What’s on TV
THE GOOD PLACE 8:30 p.m. on NBC. “The second you conceive of any system of what happens after you die, you then realize, oh, there’s a million flaws with this,” Michael Schur, the creator of this sitcom, said in a recent interview with The New York Times. In 2016, “The Good Place” began its first season by introducing Eleanor (Kristen Bell), a saleswoman who dies and finds out that admission to the show’s equivalent of heaven is determined by a point system. Much has changed since then: The show’s fourth and final season, which comes to a close Thursday night, has focused largely on the idea that sorting humans into a “good place” and a “bad place” is a fool’s errand. After the Thursday night finale, Seth Meyers will host a live panel discussion with Schur and the cast — Bell, Ted Danson, William Jackson Harper, Jameela Jamil, Manny Jacinto and D’Arcy Carden.
EVIL 10 p.m. on CBS. The first season of this supernatural thriller series has pitted an investigator (played by Mike Colter), his associate (Aasif Mandvi) and a forensic psychologist (Katja Herbers) against a villain who loves the occult (Michael Emerson). Thursday night’s episode is the season finale.
GHOST IN THE SHELL (2017) 6:45 p.m. on Syfy. If you want to see Scarlett Johansson — currently up for two Oscars for her performances in “Marriage Story” and “Jojo Rabbit” — in a movie that’s the polar opposite of “Marriage Story,” one option is this turbulent adaptation of a famed Japanese manga. Johansson plays a cyborg soldier investigating her own past in a near-future world. (Her casting caused controversy: The original manga is set in Japan, and many questioned why the part didn’t go to an Asian or Asian-American actress.) While this live-action version of the story is ambitious, curious audiences may be better off checking out the actual source material: In her review for The Times, Manohla Dargis called this film “visually cluttered yet often disappointingly drab,” adding that it’s “one of those future-shock stories that edges around the dystopian without going full-bore apocalyptic.” For a full-bore apocalypse fix on TV Thursday night, see instead the Will Smith vehicle I AM LEGEND (2007), airing at 6 p.m. on AMC.
What’s Streaming
FIGHTING WITH MY FAMILY (2019) Stream on Amazon and Hulu. Florence Pugh plays a young British woman who finds fame in the wrestling ring in this comedy. Pugh’s character, Paige, comes from a family of wrestlers (Nick Frost and Lena Headey play the parents) who run a gym in Norwich, England. Paige’s eventual stardom creates a fissure in her relationship with her older brother, Zak (Jack Lowden) — a situation that adds some tension to this witty movie. The film was written and directed by Stephen Merchant, a creator of the British version of “The Office.” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times that he has here “a terrific cast (including Vince Vaughn as a coach), pinpoint timing and a gift for visual japes and physical comedy, for arranging bodies in funny formations and for underlining everyday absurdity.”
Source: Television - nytimes.com
