A TV adaptation of Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal’s “Blindspotting” debuts on Starz. And Crystal Moselle’s “Betty” returns for a second season on HBO.
Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, June 7-June 13. Details and times are subject to change.
Monday
BABY DRIVER (2017) 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. on FX. The filmmaker Edgar Wright has two movies coming out soon: “The Sparks Brothers,” his documentary about the band Sparks, hits theaters this month; and “Last Night in Soho,” his psychological thriller with Anya Taylor-Joy and Thomasin McKenzie, which is due in October. The two movies come after a few years off for Wright — his previous feature was “Baby Driver,” a bang-bang, ha-ha heist action-comedy that stars Ansel Elgort as a weirdo getaway driver with a sweet collection of old iPods and an urgent desire to get out of the criminal life. The result, Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times, is “a pop pastiche par excellence, crammed with cubistic action; glowering and golly-gee types (played by the seductive likes of Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Eiza González and Lily James); and an encyclopedia of cinematic allusions, all basted in wall-to-wall tuneage.”
Tuesday
THE LATE SHOW WITH STEPHEN COLBERT 11:35 p.m. on CBS. The comedian Ziwe Fumudoh will wrap up the first season of her eponymous Showtime series on Sunday night, but first she’ll stop by the Ed Sullivan Theater to be a guest on Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” on Tuesday. Clive Owen, who is promoting the new TV series adaptation of Stephen King’s “Lisey’s Story” will also be a guest.
Wednesday
2021 CMT MUSIC AWARDS 8 p.m. on CMT. The singer-songwriters Kelsea Ballerini and Kane Brown will host this year’s CMT Music Awards. Performers include Miranda Lambert, Lady A, Gladys Knight, Carrie Underwood and Chris Stapleton. Lambert and Maren Morris are tied for the most award nominations, with four each.
COLLEGE SPORTS, INC. 9 p.m. on Vice. This latest installment of Vice’s “Vice Versa” indie-documentary series looks at the economics of college sports and the recent push for changes to the N.C.A.A.’s business model. It includes interviews with experts and athletes.
Thursday
KAJILLIONAIRE (2020) 6 p.m. on HBO 2. Millennial-pink foam and small-scale fraud come together in “Kajillionaire,” the most recent movie from Miranda July. Evan Rachel Wood stars as Old Dolio, the 26-year-old daughter of a pair of Los Angeles grifters (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger). The family’s life — which is spent cooking up petty schemes to pay rent on their home in an abandoned warehouse next to a bubble factory (which leaks, hence the foam) — is disrupted by the arrival of a young woman (Gina Rodriguez), who changes Old Dolio’s perception of her parents. “Wrapping damage and poverty in bubbles and sunshine, ‘Kajillionaire’ is about intimacy and neglect, brainwashing and independence,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for The Times. July, Catsoulis wrote, works “with a soulfulness that slowly gains force.”
For a year, the “Offstage” series has followed theater through a shutdown. Now we’re looking at its rebound. Join Times theater reporter Michael Paulson, as he explores signs of hope in a changed city with Lin-Manuel Miranda, a performance from Shakespeare in the Park and more.
A STAR IS BORN (1954) 5 p.m. on TCM. The 1950s version of “A Star is Born” is the rare movie that can be referred to as “the original remake.” Before Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, before Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, Judy Garland and James Mason played a young singer and her famous, fading mentor in this adaptation of the 1937 classic. TCM is showing it alongside another Technicolor Garland musical, SUMMER STOCK (1950), which airs at 3 p.m.
Friday
BETTY 11 p.m. on HBO. Like Tony Hawk popping a kickflip, grinding a rail and landing into a nose manual, the filmmaker Crystal Moselle (“The Wolfpack”) has taken a single, relatively small undertaking and developed it into something expansive: first by turning her short film in 2016 into the 2018 feature “Skate Kitchen,” a coming-of-age movie that cast members of a New York skateboarding group as fictional versions of themselves; then, last year, by creating “Betty,” a TV series adaptation of that film. The series’s episodic structure allows the skaters much more hang time. Its first season, Margaret Lyons, a Times critic, wrote, “has a shaggy vérité style that can veer toward diffuse, but in its best moments, it captures the blissful chill of just hanging out, like a puff of smoke that at any moment can either float away or give you a contact high.” Its second season debuts Friday night.
Saturday
A CALL TO SPY (2020) 5 p.m. on Showtime. The lives of three women who became spies in World War II provide the basis for this historical drama. The story tells a fictionalized account of espionage through the eyes Virginia Hall (Sarah Megan Thomas), Noor Inayat Khan (Radhika Apte) and Vera Atkins (Stana Katic), who work for Britain’s Special Operations Executive organization and eventually support the French resistance. In her review for The Times, Lovia Gyarkye called the film “propulsive.” But Gyarkye also wrote that “one wishes the movie had been imagined as a limited series, which would give viewers an opportunity to spend more time with these women whose lives were so clearly rich and textured — not to mention, courageous.”
Sunday
BLINDSPOTTING 9 p.m. on Starz. Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal vacillated between comedy and tragedy in 2018’s “Blindspotting,” their film about a parolee (Diggs) and his mischievous friend (Casal) trying to stay out of trouble in a gentrifying Oakland, Calif. This new TV series adaptation is a sequel that shifts its focus to Casal’s character’s wife, Ashley (Jasmine Cephas Jones) and her experiences after her husband is incarcerated. Diggs and Casal are executive producers of the series, and wrote Sunday night’s premiere episode.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
