Telenovela profession / FRI 12-22-23 / Card-dealing casino device / Big name in vegan cheese / Lewis who played Grizabella on Broadway / Cloverleaf cluster? / Course that might cover Dante and Ferrante, familiarly / Preantepenultimate letter / Local dubbed "the Las Vegas of the East"

Constructor: Brooke Husic and Brendan Emmett Quigley

Relative difficulty: Challenging

THEME: none

Word of the Day: DAIYA (20A: Big name in vegan cheese) —

Daiya Foods Inc. is a Canada-based dairy-alternative food company located in Burnaby, British Columbia. The company was established in 2008 by Andre Kroecher and Greg Blake. Daiya's original products are cheese analogues made from coconut oil and tapioca flour that are known for their cheese-like consistency and melting properties. They contain no animal products or soy, lactose, wheat, barley, gluten, or nuts.
Daiya is sold in natural and conventional food stores in many countries including Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, Mexico, and Hong Kong. Its products are featured on restaurant menus and in packaged food products made by Amy's Kitchen and Turtle Island Foods. Daiya has won many awards for its products, including the 2009 Veggie Award for Product of the Year. In 2011, BC Business magazine named Daiya one of the 20 most innovative companies in British Columbia.
In July 2017, Otsuka Pharmaceutical agreed to acquire 100 percent of Daiya Foods for $405 million. (wikipedia)

• • •

Lots of lovely long answers in this one, but very little whoosh today because those long answers were (weirdly, and with an exception or two) the easiest things in the grid. It's all the shorter stuff, clued with extreme and constant effort at misdirection and confusion, that took time to unravel, and kept any consistent momentum from ever really building. I've circled all the misdirection attempts on my printed-out puzzle and it's basically just covered in green. There's the obvious "?"-clue stuff, which is telling you (by way of its "?") that it's misdirecting you. [Acrylic finish?] for CEE (i.e. the letter "C"), that kind of stuff. You see a few of those in every puzzle. But then there's the non-"?" misdirection stuff, which is ... everywhere. Just in the NW corner, both "Numbers" and "count" are exploited for their multiple meanings, and end up meaning not what they look like they mean (based on ordinary syntax), but ... something else. The "Numbers" in 1A: Numbers can be read in this is not a set of mathematical figures but a book of the bible, found in the TORAH (this clue exploits the "first letters of all clues are capitalized" convention as well, so you don't see the proper noun coming). The "count" in 14A: Spanish count here is not an aristocrat, not a pal of an earl or a baron, but a literal counting off of (ironically?) numbers! In Spanish: UNO, DOS, TRES. And there's more. A lot more:

The "Bed" in 18A: Bed cover is not a thing you sleep in but a flower bed (SOIL).
The "break" in 23A: Big break is not an opportunity but a figurative rift or SCHISM.
The "Profession" in 28A: Profession in a telenovela is not an occupation but a professing of feeling, namely "I love you" ("TE AMO").
The "Knock" in 33A: Knock hard does not mean "rap, as on a door," but "criticize," i.e. PAN.
The "tables" in 3D: Parts of tables could obviously mean anything "tables" could mean (here, not surfaces you eat on but charts) (ROWS).
The "Scummy" in 41D: Scummy locales is not a metaphorical "gross" or "dirty" but a literal "possessing an actual, physical scum," namely pond scum (PONDS).
The "Setting" in 31D: Setting for most Laker home games: Abbr. is not a locale but a time setting, namely Pacific Standard Time (PST)
The "Stream" in 4D: Stream interrupters] actually did seem like it wanted to do with media streaming, but already by that point every clue word seemed like a grenade, so I assumed water might be involved (it's not: the answer is ADS).

This doesn't cover all the tough clues, just the clues that are tough in this one particular way. There's still the proper nouns you might not know—MACAU, LEONA, DAIYA, and Misselthwaite MANOR all seem like things that might cause solvers to faceplant (I wasn't totally sure about those first two, totally forgot DAIYA despite seeing it in grocery aisles a bunch, and had no idea about the MANOR, so just inferred it). This is all to say that I would've liked this better on a Saturday. Still, though, the grid does have wonderful longer marquee answers, all of them perfectly colloquial: "HOW DO YOU DO IT?""BACK SO SOON?""THANK ME LATER""I'M KIDDING!"and"OR SO IT SEEMS..." And the quality of the fill is smooth throughout. It's possible to find the cluing irksome today, but it's very hard to find fault with the grid.

[29A: Rama is one, in Arthur C. Clarke's sci-fi novel "Rendezvous With Rama"]

The CYA / CNET cross seems very slightly iffy to me. I knew both, and certainly you see CNET in the NYTXW fairly regularly (this is the fourth time this year, fifteenth time in the 2020s). But in neither case is "C" being used as a regular-ASS letter in a regular-ASS word, and since "C" is an abbr. in both directions (representing "See" and "Computer," respectively), and both answers are digital-age answers, it's possible someone opts for the wrong letter there. Also, a couple of these "?" clues feel very forced. [Make it up?] is RISE? So you (I) make it ... to a standing position? From a seated / fallen position? Huh. OK. [Little bit of make-up?] refers to the "make-up" of ... well, anything? (ATOM). Sigh, alright. But 54A: Cloverleaf cluster? as INNS, oof. I know these establishments actually call themselves "INNS" sometimes (Days Inn, Hampton Inn), but you wouldn't look at a "cluster" of motels off near the freeway exit and go "let's stay at one of those INNS.""INNS" is a quaint word belonging to bed & breakfasts in Vermont, or Mary & Joseph (or ... not Mary & Joseph, technically, I guess. Mary & Joseph Times!). The clusters of buildings near cloverleafs are motels. Maybe hotels. INNS, bah. I saw right through that "Cloverleaf" misdirection and still couldn't make anything work. CARS was my only four-letter guess. (Note, [Cloverleaf cluster?] is a defensible clue, I just hate its guts)

MACAU is "the East" as in "the Far East," not, like, Atlantic City (32A: Locale dubbed the "Las Vegas of the East"). REHASHING is a [Meeting extender] ... somehow? I really hated this clue, and had no idea what the answer was until I had almost all the crosses. Absolutely thwarted my movement out of that upper section and into the middle of the grid. First to make REHASHING into a noun (?) and then to make it so awkward and vague. Boo. Especially for a long answer, boo. Good thing there were so many other good answers to make up for it.

Hopefully you got through this one with no CHEATS. Here are some more Holiday Pet Pics! THANK ME LATER! We got five cats and one lone pupper today, sadly sitting under his Christmas tree waiting for Santa to bring him treats. Let's start with pupper, as he needs the most love:

[SOMEBODY PET ARROW RIGHT NOW (I'm looking at you, John :)]

And now, los gatos. Barney is a senior citizen and also a professional model. This photo is from a spread he did for AARP (American Association of Retired Pussycats):