What’s Streaming
DEVS Stream on FX on Hulu. Nick Offerman plays a tech mogul in “Devs,” a dark sci-fi show about a Silicon Valley company angling to become the Uber of determinism — the philosophical belief that every event in the universe is completely determined by previously existing causes. Created by the British writer-director Alex Garland (“Ex Machina,” “Annihilation”), the series casts Offerman as Forest, a man whose company specializes in quantum computing, and aims to build a computer that can calculate the cause and outcome of any event. The plot centers on one of Forest’s employees, an engineer named Lily (Sonoya Mizuno), who becomes suspicious that Forest has committed a crime. “Even through the slow stretches and occasional pretentiousness, I loved the sensual experience of ‘Devs’; it was like a spa visit for my eyes and ears,” James Poniewozik wrote in his review for The New York Times. Poniewozik called the show “half techno-thriller, half art-directed TED Talk on determinism, multiverse theory and the observer effect.”
WENDY AND LUCY (2008) Stream on Amazon and Tubi; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes and YouTube. Kelly Reichardt’s latest movie, “First Cow,” about friends in mid-19th-century Oregon Territory who come to rely on a prized bovine, hits theaters this weekend. Her 2008 feature, “Wendy and Lucy,” also shows a relationship between human and animal in the Pacific Northwest. The film stars Michelle Williams as Wendy, a young woman who meanders through Oregon and Washington on her way to Alaska. Her main companion is a mutt named Lucy. A.O. Scott labeled it a “short, simple, perfect story” in his review for The Times. “Underneath this plain narrative surface — or rather, resting on it the way a smooth stone rests in your palm — is a lucid and melancholy inquiry into the current state of American society,” he wrote.
VERNON SUBUTEX Stream on Topic. A motley crew of Parisians drift in and out of “Vernon Subutex 1,” Virginie Despentes’s novel about a former record-store owner who starts living on the street. That book, the first volume of a trilogy, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018. Its main character is played by the French movie star Romain Duris in this TV adaptation, which aired overseas last year but is now available stateside.
What’s on TV
BETTER THINGS 10 p.m. on FX. “Mom, I want to create a dating profile for you,” Frankie (Hannah Alligood) says near the start of the new, fourth season of this dramedy. That mom would be Sam, a Los Angeles matriarch played by Pamela Adlon, who ended the previous season by celebrating her 50th birthday. This fourth season continues the show’s investigation of, as James Poniewozik put it in his review of Season 3 for The Times, “aging, growing up, freedom, dependence, mortality, responsibility, the flowering and wilting of life, all at the same time.”
Source: Television - nytimes.com
