Eliana Willis

For 24 seasons, “Judge” Judy Sheindlin has reigned as the stern, hallowed matriarch of what has become the most watched courtroom in daytime television.But this coming 25th season of “Judge Judy,” Ms. Sheindlin said, may very well be her last. In an appearance on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” airing on Monday, she said that CBS would be airing reruns after the coming season ends next year. She also raised the possibility that she would compete with “Judge Judy” with a new show.In a statement to The New York Times on Monday, Ms. Sheindlin suggested that her breakup with CBS was not necessarily a smooth one.“CBS has been a fine partner for 20-plus years,” Ms. Sheindlin, 77, said in a statement to The New York Times. “They have decided to monetize their ‘Judge Judy’ library of reruns. I wish them good luck with their experiment.”Ms. Sheindlin, a former criminal and family court judge in New York City, is the highest-paid television host in the country, reportedly earning $47 million a year. For the last 10 seasons, “Judge Judy” has been No. 1 in first-run syndication, according to CBS Television Distribution. In 2017, Ms. Sheindlin sold CBS the rights to her show’s library for a reported $95 million.It was unclear whether CBS, which declined to comment, had failed to agree on a new contract with Ms. Sheindlin, or if it simply decided it did not need more new episodes now that it owned the library.In her interview with Ms. DeGeneres, Ms. Sheindlin seemed to place the onus on CBS, with whom she said she has had a “successful” 25-year relationship.“CBS, I think, sort of felt they wanted to optimally utilize the repeats of my program, because now they have 25 years of reruns,” she said in a clip released by “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” on Monday morning.“But I’m not tired,” she added, “so ‘Judy Justice’ will be coming out a year later.”Ms. Sheindlin didn’t elaborate on where her new show would air, but she implied that it wouldn’t be on CBS. She is betting that, for her fans, there is no such thing as too much judicial Judy.“The following couple of years, you should be able to catch all the reruns that CBS has sold to the stations that are currently carrying ‘Judy,’” she said. “And ‘Judy Justice’ will be going elsewhere. Isn’t that fun?” More

What’s on TVBREEDERS 10 p.m. on FX. Martin Freeman (“Sherlock, “Fargo) stars in this new irreverent comedy series about the difficulties of modern parenting. Freeman plays Eric, a dedicated father struggling with his limitations. His wife, Ally (Daisy Haggard), is also committed to and disillusioned by the reality of rearing their children, Luke and Ava. “I would die for those kids but often I also want to kill them,” Eric says in the series trailer. Ally concurs: “It’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” Both juggle their parenting duties with full time careers, financial pressures and their marriage. They also have their own parents to contend with. The sudden appearance of Ally’s estranged father (Michael McKean) adds another complication to the couple’s already hectic life. What’s StreamingLEMONY SNICKET’S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS (2004) Stream on Netflix. Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. Among adults, children’s book authors are often the most attuned to how kids experience the world. The best of them, like Roald Dahl, remind us that childhood tends to involve a fair amount of confusion and pain. “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” a cycle of books written by Daniel Handler, is particularly sensitive to the ways in which children are vulnerable. Its orphaned protagonists, Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire, are left in the care of Count Olaf, a relative who has his sight’s set on their family fortune. This film adaptation of the first three installments of the series follows the Baudelaires as they try to survive Olaf’s murderous machinations. In her review for The Times, Manohla Dargis said that the film “doesn’t have the author’s sense of whimsy (or irony)” but is nonetheless “pleasantly watchable entertainment.”NOTES ON A SCANDAL (2006) Stream on Hulu. Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. In this psychological drama, desire is never directed where it should be. Barbara (Judi Dench), an aging schoolteacher, is pathologically infatuated with Sheba (Cate Blanchett), her married colleague, while Sheba is having an affair with a teenage student (Andrew Simpson). When the relationship is discovered and she is fired and kicked out of her house, Sheba moves in with the older woman, continuing what Manohla Dargis called the film’s “misanthropic game of cat and mouse.”KUNG FU PANDA (2008) Stream on Amazon. Rent on Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. The young person who dreams of developing prowess but finds themselves stymied by his circumstances and ostensible lack of natural talent is an archetype of the “wuxia” genre. Usually, circumstances conspire to give the protagonist the training they need and their hidden potential is revealed in time for them to overcome a serious challenge. Po Ping, this movie’s wannabe hero, is an animated panda and a hapless kung fu enthusiast who is dropped into the conflict between his area’s martial arts masters and Tai Lung, a villainous snow leopard in pursuit of an artifact of great power. More

What’s on TVSATURDAY NIGHT LIVE 11:30 p.m. on NBC. John Mulaney had to postpone a show in Toronto because he was “drafted” to host this episode, Lorne Michaels wrote in an apology to Mulaney’s Canadian fans. (Mulaney weighed in: “I’m afraid of Lorne, so I do what he says.”) This is the comedian’s third time hosting the show. He’s joined by the musical guest David Byrne, the former frontman of Talking Heads, who just wrapped up the first run of his critically acclaimed Broadway show “American Utopia.” (For those who missed the stage run, don’t fret — Byrne will reprise the production in the fall, and Spike Lee has announced that he will direct a film version to be released later this year.)TYLER PERRY’S YOUNG DYLAN 8:30 p.m. on Nickelodeon. Since retiring his Madea character last year, the prolific writer and director Tyler Perry has been preoccupied with several projects. The latest is this new children’s show, starring the charismatic child rapper Dylan Gilmer, who goes by Young Dylan. The aspiring hip-hop star plays himself — a cool, street-smart kid whose grandmother sends him to live with his cousins’ family, upending their conservative way of life.SEVEN WORLDS, ONE PLANET 9 p.m. on BBC America. The first season finale of this globe-trotting nature show takes us to Africa for a close look at its wildlife, with scenes highlighting hippos in need of water and ferocious battles between giraffes.What’s StreamingCOLOR OUT OF SPACE (2020) Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes or Vudu. More than 20 years after the director Richard Stanley was fired from the set of “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” he returns to narrative filmmaking with this trippy science fiction horror. The movie, an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, follows a family that has recently traded the city life for a quiet New England Farm. When the father, Nathan (Nicolas Cage), finally manages to reignite the spark missing from his marriage, a meteorite crashes into his front yard. Its crater unleashes a mysterious energy — in the form of a hypnotic, purple hue — that goes after the family in bizarre, bloody ways. Jeannette Catsoulis named the film a Critic’s Pick in her review for The New York Times, writing that “lovers of aberrant, gooey B-movies will be all in.”PAAVO JARVI AND SOL GABETTA 2 p.m. on medici.tv. The Estonian conductor Paavo Jarvi leads Japan’s NHK Symphony Orchestra and the Argentine cellist Sol Gabetta in this live performance from Germany. The program starts with the Emily Dickinson-inspired piece “How Slow the Wind,” by the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, followed by a Schumann Cello Concerto and Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony.IN SECRET (2014) Stream on Hulu; Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu or YouTube. Elizabeth Olsen seeks passion in a loveless marriage in this romantic thriller, set in 19th-century Paris. She finds it in her husband’s friend, and it’s all downhill from there. The movie leaves Hulu Saturday. More

Lee Phillip Bell, a co-creator of two of daytime television’s most successful and enduring soap operas, “The Young and the Restless” and “The Bold and the Beautiful,” died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 91.Her death was confirmed by Eva Basler, a spokeswoman for the Bell family’s company, Bell-Phillip Television Productions.Ms. Bell also hosted a daytime talk show in Chicago for more than three decades and as a broadcast journalist produced and narrated award-winning documentary specials.She teamed up with her husband, William J. Bell, in creating “The Young and the Restless,” which has been on the air since 1973, and “The Bold and the Beautiful,” which celebrates its 33rd anniversary in March. The dramas have attracted millions of viewers while tackling difficult topics like incest, alcoholism and teen pregnancy.“The Young and the Restless” centers on a pair of fractious Midwestern families and has been a springboard for up-and-coming stars like David Hasselhoff and Tom Selleck. “The Bold and the Beautiful,” which premiered in 1987, is set in a ritzy Los Angeles fashion house.In 1975, Ms. Bell won a Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding drama series for “The Young and the Restless.” She received a lifetime achievement award from the Daytime Emmys in 2007.Loreley June Phillip was born in Riverside, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, on June 9, 1928, to James and Helen (Novak) Phillip. As a girl she often helped out in her parents’ floral shop.After graduating from Northwestern University in 1950 with a degree in microbiology, she returned to her family’s shop, working alongside her brothers and soon appearing with one of them, Russell, on a local television talk show, on WBKB, to demonstrate flower arrangements.Her on-camera presence impressed the station’s managers, and Ms. Phillip was asked to fill in as an announcer, a weather girl and a kind of home economics correspondent. She got her big break when the station was looking for someone to fill in for one of its leading talk show hosts, Lucky North, while Ms. North went on vacation.“Young women from all over Chicago showed up and auditioned,” Ms. Bell said at the Daytime Emmys ceremony in 2007. “Lucky thought they were all too good and didn’t want to lose her job, so she convinced the station to hire me instead.”The fill-in role led to stints hosting five- and 15-minute segments on weekdays and weeknights and ultimately to her own long-running show, “The Lee Phillip Show” (the name was changed a handful of times), on which she explored social issues and interviewed prominent people like Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Ronald Reagan, Judy Garland, Clint Eastwood, Oprah Winfrey, Lucille Ball, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.Her documentary specials for WBBM covered topics like foster care, divorce and rape. One special, “The Rape of Paulette,” in which she interviewed rape victims and examined a criminal justice system that often failed to bring rapists to justice, won a local Emmy and a DuPont Award from Columbia University after it aired in 1973. Her work for WBBM won 16 regional Emmys.She met William Bell while he was working as an account executive for an advertising agency in the same building as WBBM. They married in 1954, and Mr. Bell quit his advertising job to write for several soap operas, including the perennial “Days of Our Lives.”Ms. Bell continued to host and produce daytime talk shows for WBBM, but with her husband she also developed “The Innocent Years!” for CBS in 1972, before changing the title to “The Young and the Restless,” feeling it better fit the mood of the 1970s.The couple moved to Southern California in 1986 to work on “The Bold and the Beautiful,” which became a kind of sister CBS show to “The Young and the Restless,” with several actors appearing on both.Mr. Bell died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease in 2005. Ms. Bell is survived by her sons, William and Bradley; her daughter, Lauralee Bell Martin, an actress who appears on “The Young and the Restless”; her brother Russell; and eight grandchildren.William Bell is president and chief executive of Bell-Phillip Television Productions. Bradley Bell is executive producer and head writer for “The Bold and the Beautiful.” A daughter-in-law, Colleen Bell, was ambassador to Hungary under President Barack Obama and is executive director of the California Film Commission. Another daughter-in-law, Maria Arena Bell, is a former head writer of “The Young and the Restless.”Though her shows were known for being progressive and, at times, provocative, Ms. Bell believed her work was simple at its core.“We do the very same thing, don’t we — Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch and the daytime dramas,” she said on receiving her lifetime achievement award at the Daytime Emmys. “We reach out to people through our stories, through our words and examples. And hopefully, at the end of the day, we’ve touched someone’s life in a better way, and helped them.”The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

What’s on TVTHE KINGMAKER (2019) 9 p.m. Showtime. Gold and diamonds commingle with political unrest and poverty in “The Kingmaker,” Lauren Greenfield’s documentary portrait of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines. Through interviews — including with Marcos, who speaks here at length — and other footage, Greenfield (“The Queen of Versailles”) examines Marcos’s time as first lady during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s; her subsequent flight and exile; and her place in contemporary politics. The film ultimately “becomes less about one woman, her malevolent charms and quirks, and develops into an unsettling look at imperial power,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times. “Greenfield trots out the plunder and of course the shoes — those notorious emblems of Marcos’s excess — but also examines the appalling costs of that luxury,” Dargis wrote. “It’s an ugly story shrewdly told, with a sense of humor and also a deeper feeling for history.”RUPAUL’S DRAG RACE 8 p.m. on VH1. “Friday, February 28th, 13 new candidates enter the race.” No, that sentence isn’t pulled from the nightmares of the Democratic presidential candidates bracing themselves for Super Tuesday; it’s from a trailer for the latest season of RuPaul Charles’s flagship drag show, which will kick off its search for “America’s first drag-queen president.” That search will be aided by a collection of celebrity guests peppered throughout the season, including Nicki Minaj, Whoopi Goldberg, Leslie Jones, Chaka Khan and U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.DATELINE 9 p.m. on NBC. In 2013, Karl Holger Karlsen pleaded guilty to murdering his son in order to collect a life insurance policy. Earlier this month, Karlsen was convicted of killing his wife years earlier for the same reason. Those cases are the focus of this week’s edition of NBC’s “Dateline” series, which brings together interviews with those close to the events — including Karlsen himself.What’s StreamingTHE EDGE OF HEAVEN (2008) Stream on Criterion Channel; rent on Amazon. The writer-director Fatih Akin won the best screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival for “The Edge of Heaven,” his critically acclaimed look at generational differences and the experience of Turkish immigrants in Germany. As the lives of its disparate characters — mothers and daughters, a father and a son — weave together, “there is a sense of human connections becoming stronger and thicker, of a fragile moral order coalescing beneath the randomness and cruelty of modern life,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times. “By the end,” he added, “you know the characters in it so well that you can’t believe you’ve seen the movie only once, yet on a second viewing it seems completely new.”ALL THE BRIGHT PLACES (2020) Stream on Netflix. Elle Fanning and Justice Smith star in this adaptation of a Y.A. novel by Jennifer Niven, directed by Brett Haley (“The Hero”). The story centers on a pair of Indiana teenagers, Violet (Elle) and Theodore (Smith), who help each other cope with mental illness. More

Unlike most spy thrillers in which statuesque, expensively dressed women show an unexpected talent for kicking the bejeezus out of armed men, the South African series “Queen Sono” also devotes a lot of time to historical and geopolitical debate, or at least sloganeering. An armed band that might be terrorists or might be freedom fighters declares its intent to liberate Africa from “the clutches of colonization.” A hapless do-gooder calls out the primary villain for being a neocolonialist, and is quickly abducted with extreme prejudice.The real colonizer, of course, is the one behind the screen: Netflix, where the six episodes of this sprawling, earnest, likable show debut on Friday. “Queen Sono” is Netflix’s first script-to-screen commission from Africa, another small step in the streaming giant’s takeover of international television and a significant leap in the visibility of African-made stories in America and elsewhere. That “Queen Sono” is unremarkable as an action and crime drama doesn’t cancel the excitement of seeing something new (if it’s indeed new to you).As with other test cases for narrative globalization, like the South Korean “Kingdom” or the Scandinavian “Ragnarok,” you can sense the bending of local traditions toward Netflix norms: the six-episode season; the emphasis on action and mystery; the clockwork interjections of a Westernized, universally intelligible wry humor. But “Queen Sono,” created by the South African writer and performer Kagiso Lediga, doesn’t compromise when it comes to rooting its story close to home.The title character, played by Pearl Thusi — she was the lawyer and C.I.A. agent Dayana Mampasi in ABC’s “Quantico” — is an undercover agent for a South African intelligence unit, a small and beleaguered group tasked, in somewhat cartoonish fashion, with protecting the country and the continent from every kind of threat. (Its size — five core members — makes you wonder whether the budget for “Queen Sono” wasn’t as generous as it was for other Netflix series.)Queen is an ace at hand-to-hand combat, but she, and the show, are saddled with an omnipresent back story about her mother, an activist killed in mysterious circumstances when Queen was a child. Her anger and guilt over her mother’s death tie into the show’s overall mood, a simmering anguish in which the ecstatic promise of South Africa’s liberation under Nelson Mandela has ebbed into stasis and corruption, with former heroes now busily pocketing bribes. The show’s embodiment of that outlook, and the motor of the season’s plot, is an alliance (perhaps plausible, but presented in awfully broad strokes) between a squad of black-nationalist revolutionaries and a Russian security outfit called Superior Solutions. (The initials S.S. aren’t remarked on, but are hard to miss.)That framework is certainly a serious part of Lediga’s conception of the show, and it serves a similar purpose, in terms of setting a mood, as do the more anonymous conspiracies and injustices of American or French noir. But spelling it out makes “Queen Sono” sound a lot more serious than it is. Between the speeches about colonial legacies and about historical atonement, there are plenty of throwdowns and chases and shootouts, staged with competence if not much flair. They tend to show up arbitrarily, on what feels like someone’s idea of an action-show timetable. When it’s time for a fight, there’s a fight.The pleasures of “Queen Sono” come outside of the action and the highly basic presentations of espionage and police work. They’re in the generally engaging performances, including warm and sharply funny work from Abigail Kubeka as Queen’s acerbic grandmother and Enhle Mlotshwa as the patient girlfriend of a man hung up on Queen.They’re also in the show’s freewheeling, lightly cynical humor — the fictional leader of South Africa is described as “their idiot president” by an outsider and “the most bribable statesman on the planet” by one of his own citizens. And for the unfamiliar viewer, they’re also in the locations — not just Johannesburg but also Zimbabwe, Kenya and, in a Bond-style opening, Zanzibar.On the other hand, if you do have some experience with African TV — the glossy, unapologetic melodramas of Nollywood or the viscerally brutal action thrillers of South Africa — you may find “Queen Sono” unsatisfyingly in-between, a halfhearted and problematic attempt to dress up a soft Western-style drama. If so, you can take heart in another aspect of the Netflix international effect: Its next African original, the teenage mystery “Blood & Water,” is due later this spring. More