1) “Paradise,” 10 p.m., ABC. Last week’s opener had some shell-shocks: The president was killed, his mistress leads the probe, his top secret-service agent is a suspect … and (viewers learned late) this is in a post-apocalyptic bunker city. “Paradise” is from the “This Is Us” duo of writer-producer Dan Fogelman and Sterling K. Brown (shown here) as the agent. Read more…
1) “The Last of Us” season-opener, 9 p.m., HBO. In its first season, this epic drew raves and 24 Emmy nominations, including best drama. It won eight Emmys … but waited two years for this second season, which only has seven episodes. The story jumps ahead five years, finding Ellie and Joel (shown here) in his brother’s fortified compound, surrounded by danger. Read more…
1) “Secrets of the Penguins,” 8-11 p.m. Sunday, National Geographic. Each year, near Earth Day (April 22), we get a superb James Cameron production. Previous ones eyed elephants, whales and octopuses. Now (shown here) comes the best yet. It ranges from the Arctic to a desert, from 4-foot-tall to two-foot. Young filmmaker Bertie Gregory captures rich, intimate detail. Read more…
1) The Ten Commandments” (1956), 7-11:44 p.m., ABC. It’s the annual showing of an epic (shown here) that won an Oscar for special effects and was nominated for six more, including best picture. The next morning (10:30 a.m. ET), it moves to UPtv and starts a Palm Sunday marathon. Read more…
TV is ready for its Easter splurge.
That started April 12, with Moses on the mountain top; it concludes eight days later with an Easter Day surge of movies, music (including Handel’s “Messiah”) and more. In between, it has dramas (shown here is “The Chosen”) and even a stage musical.
Some of this is fueled by the era when audiences (and movie studios) savored Biblical epics. During the 1950s, four of the annual box-office champions were Biblical. All of them will be rerun this year — “Quo Vadis,” “The Ten Commandments” and “Ben-Hur” (each an Oscar-nominee for best picture) plus “The Robe.”) Read more…
1) “Now Hear This” season-opener, 9 p.m., PBS. Tony Bennett didn’t really leave his heart in San Francisco, but Frederic Chopin literally left his in Warsaw. (After his death, his sister smuggled it back to a cathedral.) That’s one of many stories about a man who loved his homeland, but was away from it for half his lifetime. Host Scott Yee visits elegant settings in Poland and Paris (shown here), hearing great music. Read more…
Wise souls knew Kaitlyn Dever would be in “The Last of Us.”
They just didn’t know when it would be or whom she would play.
As a teen, Dever did a script-reading for a “Last of Us” movie. She would star as Ellie, the young survivor of a global apocalypse.
That project faded, then returned as one of the most expensive shows in TV history. And its second season (starting 9 p.m. Sunday, April 13, on HBO) has Dever, now 28, as Abby, a skilled and vengeful soldier.
“To have it come back around, like 10-plus years later, felt surreal,” she said. Read more…
1) “Matlock,” 9 p.m., CBS. Last week ended with a jolt: Olympia learned Matty has been lying to her. Now she demands the truth; that brings a tense hour, reminding us that Kathy Bates (shown here) is a gifted, Oscar-winning actress. Can Matty salvage the friendship? Can she find who buried the vital study? That will be settled (partly) in next week’s season-finale. Read more…
The Acorn streamer – specializing in British-type mysteries – has a busy stretch of shows and news.
For now, it has three movie-length episodes of “The Chelsea Detective” (shown here in a previous season). After that are six episodes of the long-running “Brokenwood Mysteries.”
And further away? Acorn has signed Brooke Shields for a series that – in a break from Acorn tradition –will be set in the U.S. Read more…
1) “Good Cop/Bad Cop” season-finale, 9 p.m., CW. This first season has been way too short (eight episodes), but sharp and fun. Far from her role as Blair Waldorf in “Gossip Girl,” Leighton Meester plays a savvy cop, working with her smart-but-loopy brother (Luke Cook, shown here with Meester) for their dad, the police chief. Now an old case could rip the small town apart. Read more…
