What’s on TV
BREEDERS 10 p.m. on FX. Martin Freeman (“Sherlock, “Fargo) stars in this new irreverent comedy series about the difficulties of modern parenting. Freeman plays Eric, a dedicated father struggling with his limitations. His wife, Ally (Daisy Haggard), is also committed to and disillusioned by the reality of rearing their children, Luke and Ava. “I would die for those kids but often I also want to kill them,” Eric says in the series trailer. Ally concurs: “It’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” Both juggle their parenting duties with full time careers, financial pressures and their marriage. They also have their own parents to contend with. The sudden appearance of Ally’s estranged father (Michael McKean) adds another complication to the couple’s already hectic life.
What’s Streaming
LEMONY SNICKET’S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS (2004) Stream on Netflix. Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. Among adults, children’s book authors are often the most attuned to how kids experience the world. The best of them, like Roald Dahl, remind us that childhood tends to involve a fair amount of confusion and pain. “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” a cycle of books written by Daniel Handler, is particularly sensitive to the ways in which children are vulnerable. Its orphaned protagonists, Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire, are left in the care of Count Olaf, a relative who has his sight’s set on their family fortune. This film adaptation of the first three installments of the series follows the Baudelaires as they try to survive Olaf’s murderous machinations. In her review for The Times, Manohla Dargis said that the film “doesn’t have the author’s sense of whimsy (or irony)” but is nonetheless “pleasantly watchable entertainment.”
NOTES ON A SCANDAL (2006) Stream on Hulu. Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. In this psychological drama, desire is never directed where it should be. Barbara (Judi Dench), an aging schoolteacher, is pathologically infatuated with Sheba (Cate Blanchett), her married colleague, while Sheba is having an affair with a teenage student (Andrew Simpson). When the relationship is discovered and she is fired and kicked out of her house, Sheba moves in with the older woman, continuing what Manohla Dargis called the film’s “misanthropic game of cat and mouse.”
KUNG FU PANDA (2008) Stream on Amazon. Rent on Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. The young person who dreams of developing prowess but finds themselves stymied by his circumstances and ostensible lack of natural talent is an archetype of the “wuxia” genre. Usually, circumstances conspire to give the protagonist the training they need and their hidden potential is revealed in time for them to overcome a serious challenge. Po Ping, this movie’s wannabe hero, is an animated panda and a hapless kung fu enthusiast who is dropped into the conflict between his area’s martial arts masters and Tai Lung, a villainous snow leopard in pursuit of an artifact of great power.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
