Eliana Willis

What’s on TVSCHITT’S CREEK 8 p.m. on Comedy Central, Logo and Pop TV. Last week, the first half of this Canadian sitcom’s series finale brought viewers to tears. (Spoiler alert!) The four members of the Rose family prepared to leave the motel behind. Moira (Catherine O’Hara) and Johnny (Eugene Levy) are off to Los Angeles; Alexis (Annie Murphy) is heading to New York and David (Daniel Levy) and Patrick (Noah Reid) are staying in the titular town to build a new life together. In the second half of the finale, which will also air on Comedy Central and Logo, rain threatens to ruin David’s wedding day, but the family is there to lift his spirits. In an interview with The New York Times, Daniel Levy, one of the show’s creators, said the series can do without grand gestures at its end. Fans “don’t need a huge fireworks display,” he said. “They just want to know that the characters are going to be OK.” A documentary special on the making of the final season follows at 8:30 p.m.THE LAST O.G. 10:30 p.m. on TBS. When we last saw Tray (Tracy Morgan), the former convict at the center of this comedy series, he was in disarray after his food truck went up in flames. Now he’s ready to move out of his mother’s house and get back on his feet. In this third season premiere, Tray searches for a place of his own in his newly gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood and seeks advice from an old-timer (Mike Tyson) on how to move on from his checkered past. Other guest stars making an appearance this season include J.B. Smoove, Marla Gibbs and Katt Williams.What’s StreamingWHAT YOU GONNA DO WHEN THE WORLD’S ON FIRE? (2019) Rent or buy on Amazon, FandangoNOW, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu. This documentary weaves four stories together to paint a portrait of the troubles plaguing African-Americans in the South, mainly in New Orleans. There’s a teenager teaching his younger brother how to defend himself as shootings become a regular occurrence; a bar owner struggling to keep her business afloat; a group called the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which protests police violence against young black men, and a chief with the Mardi Gras Indians who is working to keep the tribes’ cultural heritage alive. Ben Kenigsberg named the movie a Critic’s Pick in his review for The Times. “Although the people in the film may have been let down by institutions,” he wrote, “they draw strength from one another.”TERRACE HOUSE: TOKYO 2019 — 2020 Stream on Netflix. If you’re searching for a quiet escape from coronavirus news, this Japanese reality series will do the trick. Back for Part 3, the show follows six young men and women living in a glamorous house in Tokyo. In the first episode, Haruka tells Peppe whether or not she will take him as her beau, and Ruka shares some personal news. More

Season 5, Episode 8: ‘Bagman’It takes nerve and skill to tell a story as grueling as the one told in “Bagman,” an episode which consists largely of two men trudging through the desert, dragging $7 million in cash and some high powered weaponry. The nerviest choice made by the writers is surely the one made at the end.There is no end. At least there is no end to the suffering. We close with Mike and Jimmy, more parched than ever, walking on a desolate dirt road, no closer to salvation than when that Suzuki Esteem sputtered and died. Well, slightly closer. At least no one is trying to kill them now.Any other show would have written the last scene like this: Mike shoots the driver in the head. Driver crashes, but in a way that leaves the car intact. Also, there’s a jug of water on the passenger seat.In the merciless universe of this show — much as with the merciless universe we live in — good luck is doled out sparingly. Jimmy had the superb fortune to be tailed by Mike as he ran his $7 million errand, which saved his life. That, in tandem with Mike’s astounding chops as a sniper, is plenty of luck, when you consider the alternatives.Vince Gilligan takes a turn as director, and his debt to “No Country for Old Men” is evident throughout. It’s especially evident during the shootout, a spectacle that owes much to the unseen massacre that ignites the action of that great Coen Brothers movie, which leaves in its aftermath a gruesome menagerie of Mexican corpses, bullet-riddled vehicles and the notable absence of a large pile of loot.Gilligan is not just borrowing “No Country’s” plot, setting and color palette. Jimmy is a quintessential Coen Brothers character in “Bagman.” He’s a guy who pursues money, gets it and then finds it is both a physical burden and an existential threat. The bag of money in this episode weighs a little more than 154 pounds, according to the internet. I’d be tempted to bury it, too. By the time Mike explains why that is a lousy idea, it’s fair to assume that Jimmy would have gladly passed on his $100,000 commission for this “little drive through the desert,” as Lalo described it.By the time Jimmy walks down the road, a piece of shiny bait for a homicidal driver, odds are he would have gladly paid $100,000 to be anywhere else.Kim called it. Not surprisingly, she is the voice of sanity in this couple, and already the spousal immunity that was the rationale for taking Jimmy as a husband is paying off. At least, rhetorically. She gets to tell Lalo that she doesn’t pose a legal threat to him because she can’t be compelled to testify against her husband.Fine. But she could be compelled to testify against Lalo, couldn’t she? Not that she knows much at this point. She knows only that the guy is part of a Mexican cartel and sent her husband to retrieve $7 million in a desert.Which, now that I type it, sounds bad. Mike has a point when he says that Kim is now in the game. We now understand why the writers made such a big deal out of Kim’s insistence on full disclosure from Jimmy as a condition for marriage. It is borderline insane for him to have told her anything about her client, let alone this early morning mission.In “The Sopranos,” Carmella was wise enough to make sure she knew as little as possible about her husband’s mafia life, and when she asked too many questions, Tony reminded her of the value of her ignorance. The difference is that Carmella knew she had married into the mob. Saul, on the other hand, is becoming a criminal in real time, right before our eyes.Anyone else fear for Kim?Odds and Ends:Tony Dalton’s performance as Lalo is one of the standouts of this season. Were you to read the script alone, you wouldn’t find a lot of charm on the page. Yet Dalton has managed to infuse this rascal with devil-may-care charisma, which somehow makes him even more frightening.“Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” have set a high bar for the creation of villains and Lalo is a worthy addition to a Hall of Fame that includes such sociopaths as Tuco, Leonel and Marco Salamanca (the shark-skinned twins who make symmetry seem chilling every time they show up) and Gus Fring.But to the extent that the show’s writers are setting up a battle between Lalo and Gus, they have a problem: We know already that Gus wins. Actually, we know simply that Gus doesn’t lose. (Maybe Lalo becomes a telenovela actor in Mexico during the “Breaking Bad” era. It could happen!) In these circumstances, how will the writers wring suspense out of the coming battle?It’s a pickle. Gilligan and his staff love to put their characters in predicaments out of which they seemingly can’t escape, so maybe they are the right people for this job.Did you think that Eminen’s “My Name Is” was playing during part of the forced march through the desert? I did. Briefly. That’s because I had never heard Labi Siffre’s “I Got the,” a 1975 soul track which the rapper, born Marshall Mathers, sampled for his breakout hit in 1999.Plot question: When Lalo shows up at court with $7 million, as I presume he will, won’t that seem suspicious? I mean, very, very suspicious?Answers in the comment section, please.I’ve got people waiting for me. They don’t know what I do, and they never will. More

James Drury, an actor best remembered as the stolid, black-hatted title character of the long-running NBC western “The Virginian,” died on Monday at his home in Houston. He was 85.Karen Lindsey, his assistant, confirmed the death in an email but did not specify a cause. Mr. Drury, who had iceberg-blue eyes and a no-nonsense mien befitting a frontier hero, appeared on television westerns like “Broken Arrow,” “Cheyenne” and “Wagon Train” before he landed the role on “The Virginian.” The show, which was loosely based on Owen Wister’s novel “The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains” (1902), began airing in 1962.Mr. Drury’s character, the tough but fair foreman of the Shiloh Ranch in Wyoming, was never named, and little of his history was revealed. He tussled with cattle rustlers and other outlaws threatening the ranch until “The Virginian” was canceled in 1971, after 249 episodes.Only two other television westerns, “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza,” lasted longer (“Gunsmoke” the longest).“The Virginian’s” weekly episodes were, unsual for a primetime series, 90 minutes long, requiring a grueling shooting schedule that Mr. Drury, speaking to Cowboys & Indians magazine in 2016, compared to “making a movie a week.”The show featured many stunts, including tricky riding sequences and fistfights, that Mr. Drury sometimes took part in himself rather than having a stuntman take his place.This had its advantages, like allowing Mr. Drury’s face to appear in action shots, and its disadvantages, like risking injuries. In one choreographed fight, a stuntman threw an extra punch, “which was not in the script and hit me in the temple like a Missouri mule,” Mr. Drury said in an oral history interview. He spent the next several days of shooting trying to hide the golf ball-size lump on his head.“The Virginian’s” cast, which rotated over the years, included Lee J. Cobb, Clu Gulager, Roberta Shore and Charles Bickford.The show also featured a host of guest stars, like Bette Davis, Lee Marvin, Joan Crawford, Robert Redford, Leonard Nimoy and Harrison Ford. Mr. Drury and Doug McClure, who played the lighthearted cowhand Trampas, were the only actors to stay with the series for its entire run.In 2018, Mr. Drury told the Oklahoma newspaper The Daily Ardmoreite that he was grateful for his years as the Virginian, even though the role defined the rest of his career.“The Virginian was an indelible character,” he said. “I had a great deal of issues getting past being seen as the man in the black hat.”James Child Drury Jr. was born on April 18, 1934, in New York City to James and Beatrice Drury. His father was a professor of marketing at New York University, and his mother’s family owned a ranch in Salem, Ore.He spent much of his childhood on the ranch, learning horseback riding, marksmanship and other skills that would prove useful to his career in westerns. He started acting in the theater when he was 8.Mr. Drury attended New York University but left after signing a contract with MGM. He appeared in films like “Forbidden Planet” (1956); “Love Me Tender” (1956), Elvis Presley’s first feature film; and “Bernardine” (1957), Pat Boone’s first feature. He also appeared in movie westerns like Sam Peckinpah’s “Ride the High Country” (1962).Mr. Drury’s first two marriages, to Cristall Orton and Phyllis Mitchell, ended in divorce. His third wife, Carl Ann Head, died in 2019.He is survived by two sons, James Jr. and Timothy; a stepdaughter, Rhonda Brown; two stepsons, Frederick Drury and Gary Schero; four grandchildren; and several great-grandchildren.After “The Virginian” went off the air, Mr. Drury starred on the television show “Firehouse” and appeared on shows like “Walker, Texas Ranger” and “Kung Fu: The Legend Continues.” He was also a regular at western festivals around the country, where fans were still eager to meet the man in the black hat. More

What’s on TVBROKEN PLACES 10 p.m. on PBS. (Check local listings.) This documentary from the writer-director Roger Weisberg looks back over his decades of work about at-risk children, weaving in the voices of researchers like Dr. Nadine Burke Harris and Dr. W. Thomas Boyce. Both pediatricians, Harris and Boyce have been recognized for their work with children whose development is affected by adversity. Through a series of interviews, these experts present hypotheses about why some people may be better equipped to overcome the challenges presented by their upbringings than others. Bobby Gross, 35, is one of the subjects who had been filmed when he was young, at age 5, in this effort to track people confronting adversity.ANTIQUES ROADSHOW: TREASURE FEVER 8 p.m. on PBS. (Check local listings.) This longstanding collectors’ classic will air a timely segment, “Treasure Fever,” continuing the tradition of appraising historical items with auction house experts. This time, the focus is on the history of medicine. The antiques include a doctor’s bag from the Lakota Sioux and the sword of a Civil War medical officer.What’s StreamingPIXOTE (1981) Stream on Criterion. The Portuguese word “pixote” roughly translates as “peewee” or “small child” — but the title character of this movie has a persona that is anything but. Though Pixote is a child, the streets of São Paulo — as well as its bars, brothels and juvenile detention centers — have left Pixote looking “about 60 years old,” Vincent Canby wrote in his review for The New York Times. The movie follows its protagonist who, after breaking out of detention, must survive in the city with the help of his new friends — and includes resorting to stealing and killing. “Pixote” is the third film by the director Hector Babenco, who “looks at his juvenile vagrants at eye level, in closeup,” Canby added, “as if he were one of them, making no judgments on their behavior, seeing no further into the future than they do.”INDIA SONG (1975) Stream on Mubi. A comment from the director Marguerite Duras on ennui, or “leprosy of the soul,” “India Song” is a meticulously arranged film about an unsatisfied woman who has come to an unfortunate end. Most of the movie takes place in the French Embassy in Calcutta, where the French ambassador lives with his wife, Anne-Marie (Delphine Seyrig). Anne-Marie is pictured in a red evening dress surrounded by her lovers and suitors — whom she has grown tired of — in a drawing room cut off from the rest of India. In what is perhaps a stylistic representation of Anne-Marie’s condition, the film’s dialogue is disembodied from its images, Canby wrote in his review for The Times, adding that “the movie looks and sounds like something shot underwater.”DEADWATER FELL Stream on Acorn TV. The actors David Tennant and Cush Jumbo star in this British mystery drama making its North American debut. After the suspicious killings of some members of a Scottish family, everything the characters know about each other is questioned. More

Season 3, Episode 4: ‘The Mother of Exiles’“No one knows you like I do. No one knows me like you.”Those were Dolores’s words to Charlotte-bot in a hotel room on last week’s episode of “Westworld,” which went out of its way to withhold the answer to a question that the show’s fans had been guessing about since the end of Season 2: Whose pearl is inside Charlotte-bot? The line suggested that somehow Dolores had saved Teddy’s pearl and popped it in Charlotte-bot’s head, or maybe it was her father, since both of them had been part of her loop. It was obvious that the writers were teasing us with a little misdirection, but the possible candidates were narrowed.And now this week, in a flurry of crosscuts across multiple planes of action, comes a mega-reveal: Charlotte-bot is Dolores. Martin Connells, the glowering “fixer” for Liam Dempsey Jr., is now a host and also Dolores. And Musashi (Hiroyuki Sanada), the Singapore yakuza boss sitting on barrels of android amniotic fluid? He’s Dolores, too. Dolores is clearly a believer in the idea that if you want something done right, do it yourself. Now the replicated control units she smuggled out of the park are a Borg-like hive of deadly, calculating, mission-oriented robots who have elegantly coordinated roles to play in the A.I. rebellion.The twist feels like a cheat, just as the show’s agonizing coyness about Charlotte’s host identity felt like a cheat. The assumption had been that bodies could be reproduced but control units could not, and that the pearls Charlotte-bot took out of the park each belonged to a separate host. But the writers of “Westworld” seek out assumptions like lemon juice to paper cuts, and this particular reveal has been calibrated to sting a little.Keep in mind, too, that Charlotte-bot told Dolores last week that she felt the real Charlotte was asserting herself, so along with these copies of pearls and copies of bodies, other metaphysical struggles are possible. So the question will then become not only who controls what body but also how much control those bodies can exert over them. Which is essentially a question about what “who” even means. Buckle up for that.In the meantime, Dolores’s plans are proceeding apace, since she has anticipated everyone’s moves, installed copies of herself in the right host bodies and choreographed an ambush, like Michael Corleone at the baptism in “The Godfather.” She and Caleb use encryption keys in the bloodstream to raid the hapless Dempsey’s bank account. She swiftly neutralizes Bernard and Stubbs’s attempt to stop her from a “kill and replace” plan to install herself at the head of Incite. She uses a Musashi-bot to run a sword through Maeve and put down the Serac threat for now. And, in Caleb, she has found a crucial disciple in the human world — at least for as long as he doesn’t question the mission, as Teddy did.In Charlotte form, Dolores also makes quick work of William, the Man in Black, but not before Ed Harris does quite a bit of acting. There’s no doubt that William is a tragic figure, though he’s brought all of the tragedies upon himself. He was instrumental in conceiving Westworld and unleashing the robot apocalypse that is currently on the march. His choices also led to his brother-in-law Logan sinking into despair and dying of an overdose, his wife Juliet slicing her wrists in the bathtub and William himself shooting his daughter Emily by accident, due to an itchy trigger finger and a loose grip on reality. Now he’s haunted by all these ghosts, Emily’s especially, and shattering enough mirrors to guarantee several decades of bad luck.Charlottes comes to William with the ostensible purpose of securing his support to take Delos private before Serac seizes the company in a hostile takeover. But getting him cleaned up and presentable allows the show — and Harris — too much latitude in expressing his mental state. In the first season, when a younger William, played by Jimmi Simpson, was exploring the park, it was fascinating to witness his corruptibility, but the Man In Black character is a caterwauling bore, doomed to rattle around the labyrinth of his own twisted conscience. There’s nothing in the center of that maze.Paranoid Androids:The question ghost-Emily poses to her father, “What if every choice you ever made wasn’t a choice at all, but something written in your code?,” continues to draw a connection between humans and hosts, and their similar inability to follow their own paths. The message of the third season is that humans have loops, too, and they also have monitors to make sure they stay on them.A flashback with Dolores and Bernard foreshadows the multiple Doloreses twist: “You taught me that anything was possible. We could be anyone we wanted, live however we want. Isn’t that what you believe?”The future may be a hellish Silicon Valley dystopia, but picking out clothes without the hassle of changing rooms is an undeniable victory for progress.Incidentally, Paris has been nuked. There will be no follow-up questions at this time.Genre is a hell of a drug. As is “Genre.” More