NEW YORK (AP) — Pharrell Williams has high hopes for the Met Gala, the first to focus exclusively on Black designers, and the first in more than 20 years to have a menswear theme.

“I want it to feel like the most epic night of power, a reflection of Black resiliency in a world that continues to be colonized, by which I mean policies and legislation that are nothing short of that,” he recently told Vogue.

“It’s our turn.”

Indeed. And welcome to the first Monday in May.

How to watch the 2025 Met Gala

Vogue will livestream the gala starting at 6 p.m. Eastern on Vogue.com, its YouTube channel and across its other digital platforms. Teyana Taylor, La La Anthony and Ego Nwodim will host the stream. Emma Chamberlain will also do interviews on the carpet.

The Associated Press will stream the gala carpet on delay beginning at 6:30 p.m. The feeds will be available on YouTube and APNews.com.

E! will begin live coverage at 6 p.m. on TV. The livestream will be available on Peacock, E! Online and YouTube, along with the network’s other social media feeds.

By MARK KENNEDY, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — If Ellen Pompeo was going to find a new role after 20 years as a series regular on ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” it had to be good. She thinks she found it as a supermom whose world collapses in Hulu’s “Good American Family.”

“I was looking for a real creative challenge. I think this was an opportunity for me to completely disappear into a role,″ she says. ”Characters like this don’t come along all that often.”

“Good American Family” fictionalizes the true story of Natalia Grace, a Ukrainian-born orphan with dwarfism, adopted as a child by an American family who soon accuse her of being a troubled adult masquerading as a child.

Pompeo plays the adoptive mother, whose character has become a sought-after speaker and author after raising a son with autism but now finds herself at her breaking point with Natalia, her marriage strained, in legal jeopardy and her reputation in tatters.

“We were taking all of this research that we had and amplifying certain moments or adjusting certain moments for kind of dramatic license,” says creator and co-showrunner Katie Robbins, who also created “Sunny” and wrote for “The Affair.”

“The thing that was important was to tell a propulsive, compulsively watchable thing. But, at the end of the day, the most important thing was to tell it in an emotionally authentic way to the people involved.”

Over the years, the case has been the focus of several TV shows, podcasts and documentaries, including Investigation Discovery’s documentary series “The Curious Case of Natalia Grace.”

If viewers hope to get clarity on who the heroes are, they’ll not get it with “Good American Family.” It tells the story from multiple points of view, flashing forward and back, to create a complex family drama that also has elements of a thriller.

“You really have to pay attention to who’s doing the telling,” says Robbins. “Using perspective felt like an opportunity both to tell the story in kind of a fresh way, but also to allow us as storytellers to take the viewers on an experience that would help them confront their own biases in unexpected ways.”

The series starts from the perspective of the adoptive parents — Mark Duplass plays the husband — who eventually turn on their new family member, but then shifts to Natalia (played by Imogen Faith Reid), slowly cracking any snap judgements the viewer may have had going into it.

“Everybody comes into the experience of this story with sort of a different way of looking at it,” says co-showrunner and executive producer Sarah Sutherland. “It’s sort of like a Rorschach test. I just thought it was super-fascinating to sit with the kind of uncomfortableness of that.”

The eight episodes that begin debuting Wednesday seamlessly blend darkness and light, showing moments of family levity but also scenes of terror, as when Natalia approaches her parents’ bed with a knife.

“In terms of the tone, I am a firm believer that life is a real genre blend,” says Robbins. “The happiest moments in my life have been undercut often with tragedy, and the saddest moments I’ve often found myself finding something absurdly hilarious. So everything that I write, I try to let all live in that sort of tension because that’s what it is to be a person.”

At its core, “Good American Family” is about how we are raised and how that can echo through generations. We learn how Pompeo’s character was treated by her mother and how Natalia wasn’t always raised with familial love, priming them for a face-off.

“We’re examining the ways in which one is parented trickles down and affects the way that one is a parent,” says Robbins. “It changes the way that you perceive the world. And I think that it’s a fascinating thing that runs through the arc of this series.”

Pompeo sees an even larger point — how everyone these days has their own definitive version of events and sees things though their own lens.

“Even if you know you’re wrong, it takes an extraordinary amount of humility to admit you’re wrong. It’s so much easier to just go with it, stick to the ego and say, ‘I wasn’t wrong,’” she says.

“We see that with what’s happening in our country right now. People will fight to the death before they admit they were wrong. It doesn’t matter what we see, right?” she adds.

“We’re seeing things before our eyes, and people are saying something else, and we’re choosing to believe what was said instead of what we’re seeing. And that is the human condition.”

Do you know these names: Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Steven Parent, Jay Sebring, and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca?

What if I add to that list the name Sharon Tate?

Ah, there you go. Those are the names of the people killed by Charles Manson and some demented buddies on the nights of Aug. 8 and 9, 1969, Tate the most prominent because she was a beautiful movie star, married to filmmaker Roman Polanski, and eight months pregnant with their child.

Long time ago, I know, but so bloody and weird and headline-grabbing were the killings and ensuing trial and most of all Manson that they have stayed through the decades, creeping into our dreams and nightmares and coming at us in a steady stream of rehashing in books, movies and documentaries, some interesting and some merely exploitative.

Last time I remember remembering them was while watching “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 movie that, among many things, presented a wild, fairy tale version of the real events of what was and still is called the Manson Family murders.

Now they are on my mind yet again, courtesy of “Chaos: The Manson Murders,” a new 90-minute documentary on Netflix.

This would not ordinarily have grabbed my attention because I have over the decades had more than my fill of Manson-related subjects. But attached to “Chaos” is the name Errol Morris, which gives it a certain credibility, since he is a distinguished documentarian whose decades-long career has included such films as 1978’s “Gates of Heaven,” on the pet cemetery business; 1988’s “The Thin Blue Line,” his controversial film about the trial and conviction of a man for killing a Dallas police officer; 2003’s “The Fog of War,” which focused on Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense during much of the Vietnam War, which won an Academy Award; and “The Pigeon Tunnel” in 2023, about the life and work of novelist John le Carré.

Here he is in collaboration (and in intellectual tussle) with the work of journalist Tom O’Neill, in essence adapting O’Neill’s 2019 book, “CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties,” written with Dan Piepenbring.

As I expected, there is much repetition of known facts in the film but a judicious use of vintage material as Manson, a failed musician, wild-eyed hippie and career criminal, gets released from prison and in 1967 gathers around himself a bunch of younger outcasts who are all living together on a rusted movie set of a rural ranch.

He orders some of them to commit a series of gruesome murders and we get those bare details, effectively and vividly dramatized, but we don’t get a lot of answers to some of the questions raised and there are plenty.

Among them, and in no specific order:

Why didn’t law enforcement, such as parole officers, slap cuffs on Manson and send him back to jail when they had the chance?

And how did Manson turn a group of peaceful hippies into savage killers?

How was it that the Beach Boys’ drummer Dennis Wilson and record producer Terry Melcher nearly gave Manson a record deal? We hear Manson play guitar and sing.

What do the activist organization Black Panthers have to do with this?

Why do we meet Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassin Jack Ruby? And what is Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, a subcontractor for the CIA’s Project MKUltra, doing as a court-appointed psychiatrist for Ruby? And what is Project MKUltra?

How did the Beatles’ “White Album” get into the mix?

There are more questions and plenty of talking, some of it from interviews of Manson by such TV personalities as Diane Sawyer, Geraldo Rivera and Tom Snyder.

Among the most compelling conversations are those that take place between Morris and O’Neill. The filmmaker asks pointed questions, operating from an authoritative position. He is probing, curious, suitably skeptical. And he is able to get O’Neill to admit, “Frankly, I still don’t know what happened. But I know that what we were told isn’t what happened.”

The movie is held together more by its questions (for which there are no real answers) than facts, presented in a visually compelling manner, peppered with such things as old movie clips of Laurence Harvey in the “Manchurian Candidate,” in which mind control is a chilling key.

Morris and his compelling moviemaking is likely to get a bigger audience than most of his previous documentary work. That’s a good thing even though this is not his finest work.

It’s still pretty good and one of the finer offerings of the massive Manson-inspired “Helter Skelter” enterprise. And if you ask yourself why there is not much here from Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, know that his book, “Helter Skelter” was published in 1974. It was subtitled “The True Story of the Manson Murders.” And it is the best-selling true crime book of all time.

rkogan@chicagotribune.com