A documentary on HBO looks at small towns across America. And PBS’s “Great Performances” revisits a pivotal 1973 classical music tour.
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, April 12-18. Details and times are subject to change.
Monday
INDEPENDENT LENS: DOWN A DARK STAIRWELL (2021) 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). On Nov. 20, 2014, a New York City police officer, Peter Liang, shot and killed Akai Gurley, 28, who was unarmed. (Liang was convicted of manslaughter in 2016.) Gurley was Black; Liang is Chinese-American. The killing prompted a particularly complex debate over police accountability, which the filmmaker Ursula Liang (who is not related to Peter Liang) explores in this new documentary.
STAR WARS: EPISODE III — REVENGE OF THE SITH (2005) 8:05 p.m. and 11:20 on TNT. The streaming series “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” one of the highest-profile new “Star Wars” projects, is supposed to start filming this month, but it’ll be a little while before it gets to Disney+. (There’s no light speed when multimillion-dollar TV shoots are involved.) The new series will reunite Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen, who starred together in this “Star Wars” prequel, which charts the final chapter of young Anakin Skywalker’s transformation into Darth Vader. In his review for The New York Times, A.O. Scott called it “by far the best film in the more recent trilogy.” How significant that praise is, though, is a matter of debate.
Tuesday
OUR TOWNS 9 p.m. on HBO. The journalists (and married couple) Deborah Fallows and James Fallows spent several years puttering through American skies in their small, single-engine Cirrus SR-22 plane, visiting small towns across the country. The resulting book, “Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America,” released in 2018, looks at the beauty of and the challenges faced by American towns. This documentary from the filmmakers Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan is based on the Fallows’s book; it looks at how small-town life is changing around the country.
Wednesday
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (1971) 11:45 p.m. on TCM. Peter Bogdanovich’s big-screen adaptation of the 1966 Larry McMurtry novel “The Last Picture Show” is set in a small Texas town. The story follows a pair of high school seniors (Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges) as they prepare for their post-graduation lives and navigate two very different romances (Cybill Shepherd plays a high-school girlfriend; Cloris Leachman plays the wife of the school’s basketball coach, who is having an affair with one of the boys). This year is the film’s 50th anniversary — but in many ways, it feels considerably older, as Bogdanovich produced it to feel like a product of Hollywood’s Golden Age. As Vincent Canby wrote in his review for The Times, the film is “a tribute to the kind of straightforward narrative filmmaking that flourished in the Hollywood of the 1930 and 1940s, when occasionally classic movies were made on the assembly lines, but it’s a tribute by a director who started out not in the cutting room, but at the Museum of Modern Art.”
Thursday
FARGO (1996) 7:30 p.m. on Showtime. Frances McDormand did her best to avoid publicity for years after receiving her first Academy Award, which she won for her role as a pregnant police chief hunting down a pair of killers in this Coen brothers staple. That decision “gave me a mystery back to who I was,” she explained in a recent interview with The Times, “and then in the roles I performed, I could take an audience to a place where someone who sold watches or perfume and magazines couldn’t.” With McDormand up this year for her third best actress Academy Award (for her role in Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland”), this is a natural time to revisit “Fargo.”
A QUIET PLACE (2018) 5:50 p.m. on FXM. After repeated delays in response to the pandemic, “A Quiet Place Part II” seems like it may actually be released next month. (The film had its world premiere event on March 8, 2020, and was slated to open shortly afterward — you know what happens next.) The original movie follows a couple (John Krasinski and Emily Blunt) who have to keep themselves and their children alive in a post-apocalyptic world that has been overtaken by monsters who can’t see, and who hunt using their ears. It’s a conveniently cinematic premise that Krasinski, who also directed, takes advantage of. “The full-on action sequences, staged with stalking tension in settings as diverse as a grain silo and a bathtub, are nervily potent,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for The Times, even if the film as a whole is “neither intellectually deep nor even logically sound.”
Friday
GREAT PERFORMANCES: BEETHOVEN IN BEIJING 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). When the Philadelphia Orchestra took the stage in Beijing in 1973, it became the first American symphony orchestra to perform in China since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. That tour is the subject of this documentary, which revisits the performances and looks at how they laid the groundwork for the eventual return of Western art to China. The film includes interviews with the composer Tan Dun, the pianist Lang Lang, and the conductor and pianist Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
Saturday
CREED (2015) 5 p.m. on VH1. The director Ryan Coogler breathed new life into the “Rocky” franchise with this sort-of sequel, sort-of spinoff. The film stars Michael B. Jordan as Adonis Creed. Adonis is a child of Apollo Creed, the fictional onetime rival of Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), who takes Adonis under his extraordinarily toned wing.
Sunday
THE 56TH ANNUAL ACADEMY OF COUNTRY MUSIC AWARDS 8 p.m. on CBS. This year’s Academy of Country Music Awards ceremony will be broadcast from three venues around Nashville: the Ryman Auditorium, the Grand Ole Opry House and the Bluebird Cafe. Keith Urban and Mickey Guyton will host, with a lineup of performers that includes Miranda Lambert, Maren Morris and Carrie Underwood.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
