What’s Streaming
TIMMY FAILURE: MISTAKES WERE MADE (2020) Stream on Disney Plus. The filmmaker Tom McCarthy’s 2015 investigative journalism nail-biter, “Spotlight,” won an Academy Award for best picture. “Timmy Failure,” his first movie since, is also about professional investigators. One of them is an 11-year-old. The other is a polar bear. Based on a series of children’s books by Stephan Pastis (who wrote the screenplay with McCarthy), “Timmy Failure” centers on a boy (Winslow Fegley) who runs a detective business in Portland, Ore., with the help of a big, hairy Arctic escapee. While the movie is skipping theaters in favor of being released directly on Disney’s streaming service, “it owes more to independent cinema than anything,” McCarthy told The New York Times last year. It is both family-oriented and proudly weird.
HONEY BOY (2019) Stream on Amazon. Shia LaBeouf plays a version of his own father in this intense drama, which was written by LaBeouf and directed by Alma Har’el. Telling a fictionalized account of LaBeouf’s early stardom, more recent erratic behavior and rehabilitation, “Honey Boy” splits its story between two time periods: The 1990s, where it focuses on a young child actor, Otis (Noah Jupe), being bullied by his father (LaBeouf), and the 2000s, where it turns to an older Otis (Lucas Hedges), a blockbuster star with an explosive offscreen life. LaBeouf’s “drawling evocation of his own father is a bravura incarnation of resentment,” Glenn Kenny wrote in his review for The Times. But the film at large, Kenny wrote, is “a flex: an assertion of the clout LaBeouf claims, in interviews, to no longer have.”
MYTHIC QUEST: RAVEN’S BANQUET Stream on Apple TV Plus. Some of the minds behind “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” trade that show’s dingy bar lighting for the fluorescent shine of a video game studio in this new comedy series, the latest entry in Apple’s quest to shake up the world of streaming TV. Created by the “It’s Always Sunny” stars and producers Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day along with Megan Ganz, another producer of that show, “Mythic Quest” centers on a fictional video game company headed by a controlling, self-obsessed creative director (McElhenney, whose character does things like bring his own PowerPoint remote to somebody else’s presentation). The employees under his reign are played by a cast that includes Danny Pudi (“Community”), David Hornsby (another “It’s Always Sunny” face), Imani Hakim (“Everybody Hates Chris”) and F. Murray Abraham.
What’s on TV
THE DEMOCRATIC DEBATE 8 p.m. on ABC. Qualifying candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination will take the stage in New Hampshire on Friday night for their latest debate, capping off a turbulent week that began with Iowa caucuses thrown into disarray by a delay in results. The debate will give candidates a chance to appeal to voters before next week’s New Hampshire primaries. It’s scheduled to last three hours, giving any TV audiences made anxious by the proceedings a chance to decompress with the season-four premiere of HBO’s marijuana-dealer series, HIGH MAINTENANCE, which will air on that network at 11 p.m.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
