What’s Streaming
NORMAL PEOPLE Stream on Hulu. In one of their first scenes together, Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Connell (Paul Mescal), the Irish teenagers at the center of this series, have a conversation about that most weighty of adolescent subjects: their school grades. “You’re smarter than me,” Connell says. Marianne’s reply comes quickly, in a matter-of-fact tone: “Smarter than everyone,” she says. Based on the best-selling novel by Sally Rooney, “Normal People” follows the pair as they ricochet through an on-again, off-again romantic relationship. Their bond highlights issues of social class, as the pair — one wealthy, one poor — move from secondary school to university. In his review for The New York Times, James Poniewozik called the series “a complex study of power wrapped up in a heartfelt teen soap.”
A SECRET LOVE (2020) Stream on Netflix. Lovers from a different generation look back at their life together in this moving documentary. The film profiles the professional baseball player Terry Donahue and Pat Henschel, two women who for decades kept their romantic partnership largely hidden, but were finally liberated from that secrecy late in life.
WHAT DO WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT?: CONVERSATIONS ON ZOOM Stream on Publictheater.org. The playwright Richard Nelson first introduced the Apples, a fictional middle-class American family, in 2010, when the Public Theater staged “That Hopey Changey Thing.” That play saw the members of the Apple clan gather around a dinner table on the evening of the 2010 midterm elections. (The timing was real; it was actually the evening of the midterm elections.) The Public staged sequels in 2011, 2012 and 2013, with each play set around the same dinner table. But the family and their audience will have a different setup in this new addition to the cycle, in which the characters trade the dinner table for a Zoom conference call, and audience members swap the Public Theater for their laptop screens. Set in 2020, the play finds the family members catching up remotely, with the eldest Apple sister, Barbara (played by Maryann Plunkett), recovering from severe Covid-19 symptoms. It will be performed through a livestream beginning at 7:30 p.m. “It’s a way to embrace the moment,” Jay O. Sanders, who plays Barbara’s brother, Richard, said in a recent interview with The Times. “This play isn’t saying, ‘Let’s pretend we’re in a theater.’ This is saying: ‘OK, we’re at home. Let’s do this at home.’”
What’s on TV
NATURE: SPY IN THE WILD 2 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Nature footage gets a surreal twist in this mini-series, which arms animatronic animals with hidden cameras and places them alongside their real counterparts in the wild. First up: a “spy gorilla” with a camera crammed into one of its eye sockets. The puppet’s integration into a group of actual mountain gorillas goes smoothly — until one of the real gorillas knocks it over.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
