As the new “Mayans M.C.” season booms onto the screen, it seems a bit like a newsreel from the Ukraine.
Here are the bikers, outgunned and outmanned, clinging to their home. They have Molotov cocktails, makeshift shields and desperation.
These scenes (10 p.m. Tuesday, April 19, on FX) were filmed before the Ukraine war, but they remind us that fact inspires fiction. Consider: Read more…
For most shows, this would have been simple:
One of the actors couldn’t get there, due to Covic concerns. It was time to write her out and move on.
But that’s not how “Better Things” (shown here) works. For its final season, it took elaborate steps — peaking with an episode that airs at 10 p.m. Monday (April 18), then moves to Hulu. “This would have been woefully incomplete without it,” Adlon said in a Television Critics Association virtual press conference. Read more…
This is a tiny slice of Americana – just 41 people, spread over 232 years.
Now a new series views some of the most intriguing: “The First Lady” (9 p.m. Sundays on Showtime, starting on Easter) spends its first season with three women. Michelle Pfeiffer is Betty Ford, Viola Davis is Michelle Obama and Gillian Anderson is Eleanor Roosevelt … who was sort of at the turning point.
“Eleanor was, in my mind, the first modern First Lady,” said Cathy Schulman, who produces the series and wrote the second of this year’s 10 episodes. Read more…
Let’s consider this a benefit from the pandemic.
Yes, the lockdown made people better at laptops and Zoom calls and maybe home-cooking. Beyond that, it drove them to dance … setting up “Come Dance with Me” (shown here0, which debuts at 8 p.m. Friday (April 15) on CBS.
“This was pre-pandemic when we first got into it,” LL Cool J, one of the producers, told the Television Critics Association. “Even at that time, I felt … the world could use a nice family show that people could dance to.”
Then the world changed, said Chris O’Donnell, another producer. “Covid hit and Tiktok hit and all of a sudden, we found ourselves sheltering in place with our families and doing our little dance moves.” Read more…
A first love can have a powerful grip on someone – even on a well-bred British lad.
So Hugh Laurie says he’ll always remember “my first-ever crush.” Frankie Derwent was “quick and bold and ready to take a chance.”
And fictional. She’s a character in a novel – “Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?” (shown here) – that he’s adapted and directed; it reaches the Britbox streaming service on Tuesday (April 12). Read more…
Many of us might feel mired in one side of our brain. We’re left-brained scientists and engineers, right-brained artists and authors.
But there are rare exceptions, the both-brained sort. They’re as exotic as Leonardo da Vinci … or as down-to-earth as Benjamin Franklin, the subject of Ken Burns’ latest PBS documentary (8 p.m. Monday and Tuesday, April 4-5, repeating at 10).
“He was able to connect art and science, able to connect the humanities and the technology,” biographer Walter Isaacson said of Franklin (shown here in an artist’s rendition). “He cared about everything you could possibly learn about, from art to anatomy, math to music.” Read more…
The world has had plenty of reasons for actors to be unemployed. There’s Covid, halting Read more…
Chances are, this isn’t what a kid in rural Louisiana expects:
Some day, his youth will be turned into … an opera. A real one, opening the Metropolitan Opera season, with bejeweled fans applauding and bespectacled critics praising.
That’s what happened to Charles Blow (shown here). His memoir — “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” at 9 p.m. Friday (April 1) on PBS – was the first show after the Met’s long Covid break. Read more…
In the real-life, regular-guy world of Tom Smallwood, this was a long shot.
He was a laid-off autoworker, the son of an autoworker, in a factory town. His people got steady paychecks, but he was going to take a chance. At 31, married with one child, he took a detour.
He “decided, against all odds, to follow his dream of becoming a professional bowler,” said Brian d’Arcy James, an actor-turned-producer. That’s at the core of “How We Roll” (shown here), the comedy that debuts at 9:30 p.m. Thursday (March 31) on CBS. Read more…
If you think all country-music singers are alike, try this simple experiment: Plunk two of them into the Panama jungle.
That’s what “Beyond the Edge” (9 p.m. Wednesdays on CBS) did, dropping Craig Morgan and Lauren Alaina into the jungle, alongside seven other celebrities. The result?
— For Alaina (shown here, front), it was overwhelming at first. She recalls “going, ‘Are we alive? What’s happening?’”
— For her country colleague, it was sort of natural. “Without Craig Morgan, none of us would be alive now,” Paulina Porizkova, a former supermodel, said. Read more…
