What’s on TV
TWENTIES 10 p.m. on BET. After Lena Waithe’s groundbreaking 2017 Emmy win — in which she became the first African-American woman to receive an Emmy for outstanding writing in a comedy series — the filmmaker Ava DuVernay posted to social media a photograph of a young Waithe balancing trays of coffee in the back seat of a car. It was a throwback to Waithe’s early career, in which she was an assistant to people in Hollywood, including DuVernay. That period of Waithe’s life provides the basis for her new, semi-autobiographical comedy series, “Twenties,” which centers on a 24-year-old aspiring television writer, Hattie (Jonica T. Gibbs) — though it moves the action to the present day. “This is our world post my character on ‘Master of None;’ it’s a world post ‘Get Out’; it’s a world post ‘Moonlight,’” Waithe said of the show in a recent interview with The New York Times. “This is the first time a masculine-of-center black woman has been the center of a show on prime-time TV.”
DAVE 10 p.m. on FXX. The rise of a different entertainer is chronicled in this new series, which stars Dave Burd (a.k.a. the YouTube-born comic rapper Lil Dicky) as a fictionalized version of himself. The first episode begins in a doctor’s office, with Dave (Burd) giving a detailed description of his nether regions — a perfect litmus test for viewers deciding whether or not the series is for them. Burd’s co-creator, Jeff Schaffer (“The League,” “Seinfeld”), said in a recent interview with The Times that “the arc of the first season is, how do you go from having people view your video to being viewed as an actual rap artist?”
What’s Streaming
LIL PEEP: EVERYBODY’S EVERYTHING (2019) Stream on Netflix; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. A distinctive blend of emo and hip-hop shot the rapper Lil Peep to stardom, before his death from an accidental overdose in 2017 cut his career short. “Everybody’s Everything,” directed by Sebastian Jones and Ramez Silyan, offers a documentary look at the rapper’s rise. The film “doesn’t spend enough time on Peep’s lyrics and music-making process,” Ken Jaworowski wrote in his review for The Times. “And it was completed before a recent contentious lawsuit was filed by his mother against her son’s talent agency and label, whom she accuses of plying him with drugs.” Nevertheless, Jaworowski wrote, the documentary “is an engaging account of Peep’s life and the alt-music scene.”
THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS (2009) Stream on Hulu and Netflix; rent on iTunes and Vudu. About a decade before he played a mustachioed Army man in Hulu’s recent “Catch-22” adaptation, George Clooney played a … mustachioed Army man in this dark comedy. Adapted from a book by Jon Ronson and directed by Grant Heslov, “The Men Who Stare At Goats” casts Clooney, Jeff Bridges and Stephen Lang as members of an experimental Army program concerned with parapsychology. Manohla Dargis called it a “likable, lightweight, absurdist comedy” in her review for The Times.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
