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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Catfish’ and ‘Welcome to Wrexham’

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      The show, hosted by Nev Schulman and Kamie Crawford, begins its ninth season on MTV. Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s soccer series on FX is back for Season 3.For those like me who still haven’t cut the cord, here is a selection of cable and network TV shows, movies and specials that broadcast this week, April 29-May 5. Details and times are subject to change.MondayERIN BROCKOVICH (2000) 8 p.m. on Pop. Anyone growing up with dreams of saving the world can probably find inspiration in Julia Roberts’s performance as Erin Brockovich. She is a single mom down to her last few dollars, but she’s smart and resourceful and possesses highly developed investigative Spidey senses. Based on a true story, this fictionalized movie follows Brockovich as she gets a low-level job at a law firm and finds a cover-up of toxic exposure that is threatening lives. A.O. Scott, in his review for The New York Times noted that after a robust, creative opening, Roberts and the director, Steven Soderbergh, rely heavily on clichés, and Scott ruefully submits to the same technique, writing that the movie “will make you laugh. It will make you cry. It will make you stand up and cheer. ‘Erin Brockovich’ is the feel-good movie of the year.”From left: Cher and Nicolas Cage in “Moonstruck.”MGMMOONSTRUCK (1987) 8 p.m. on TCM. If you’re in the mood for desire on Monday night instead of the fighting spirit of Erin Brockovich, see Cher and Nicolas Cage in this slightly chaotic but ultimately dreamy romantic comedy. Cher plays Loretta, a widow who finds herself falling in love with her new boyfriend’s younger brother, Ronny (Cage). This movie offers “further proof that Cher has evolved into the kind of larger-than-life movie star who’s worth watching whatever she does,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review for The Times.TuesdayCATFISH 8 p.m. on MTV. In an ideal world, anytime someone ghosts you on a dating app, Nev Schulman and Kamie Crawford (and let’s throw Max Joseph into this fantasy for old times’s sake) would materialize next to you and put that person in their place. And for the people who write in to the show — that is basically what happens. “Each episode unfolds like a detective show, with the, host Nev Schulman, summoned to untangle truth from lies, to take relationships that exist only on computers and phones and drag them into our three-dimensional reality,” Maya Salam wrote in a recent feature in The Times about the show, which is back for its ninth season.WednesdayPRISONER IN RUSSIA: THE BRITTNEY GRINER INTERVIEW 10 p.m. on ABC. In March of 2022, Brittney Griner, a WNBA center, was detained in Russia on drug charges. She ended up pleading guilty in a Russian court and being sentenced to nine years in prison. In December of that year, nearly 10 months later, she was released via a prisoner swap for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer. For the first time, she is sitting down for an interview — with Robin Roberts — to discuss her time in prison.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Colin Jost Falls Flat at White House Correspondents Dinner

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      The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner has occasionally featured some great stand-up comedy. This “S.N.L.” veteran’s set will not join that list.People in the media have long worried about the impact of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on journalism. The concern is that it makes the press look too chummy with politicians it’s covering. But what is the impact on comedy?A high-ceilinged hotel ballroom filled with television anchors and network executives is a tough room for stand-up, but no more so than an awards show. Trevor Noah was funnier two years ago at the dinner than he was at this year’s Grammys.A murderer’s row of comics, among them Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel and Wanda Sykes, has taken this assignment because it’s one of the most high-profile live comedy sets of the year. And there has been one truly great performance (Stephen Colbert), some very good ones (Seth Meyers, Larry Wilmore) and one so thrillingly biting (Michelle Wolf) that the next year they replaced the comic with a historian.Colin Jost’s set this year does not belong in that pantheon. Without his Weekend Update partner Michael Che next to him, he came off muted, vanilla, less assured than usual. With long pauses between jokes, eyes darting side to side, he occasionally took a drink of water and at least once acknowledged the lack of laughter in the room. His jokes leaned on wordplay more than a specific or novel perspective. “Some incredible news organizations here,” began one of his pricklier jokes, finished by: “Also, some credible ones.”He focused much fire on former President Donald J. Trump. “Now that O.J.’s dead, who is the front-runner for V.P.?” he asked. “Diddy?” Like Biden, Jost has always benefited from low expectations. No one that handsome could be funny, right? But he has grown into his role at “Saturday Night Live,” proving to be an especially strong straight man adept at the comedy of embarrassment. You could see his timing in one of the odder moments when he said Robert Kennedy Jr. could be the third Catholic president and the C-SPAN camera cut to President Biden (the second) clapping. Jost retreated on Kennedy’s chances one beat later: “Like his vaccine card says, he doesn’t have a shot.”For the third year in a row, President’s Biden’s age played a big role in the comedy (“Technology wasn’t invented when he was in high school,” Jost said of Biden), even in the president’s own set. Two years ago, Biden joked that he was friends with Calvin Coolidge. Last year, he referred to his “pal Jimmy Madison.” The president took a slightly different and more confrontational approach this time. “Age is an issue,” he said early. “I’m a grown man running against a 6-year-old.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Guilt’ Review: When the Lights Go Out in Edinburgh

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      The final season of Scotland’s most notable TV drama, on PBS’s “Masterpiece,” is a suitably twisty and sardonic send-off for the battling McCall brothers.Contains spoilers for Seasons 1 and 2 of “Guilt.”“Guilt,” a pioneering series in Scottish television — it was the first drama commissioned by the newly formed BBC Scotland channel in 2019 — has built an audience well beyond its borders. A melancholy tale of family dysfunction presented as a complicated crime thriller, it combines British regionalism with peak TV-style poker-faced comedy in a way that has made it a critical darling around the world.Created and written by Neil Forsyth, “Guilt” has arrived in dense, lively four-episode bursts; the third and final season has its American premiere on PBS’s “Masterpiece” beginning Sunday. Each installment has been organized around a psycho-philosophical theme: first guilt, then revenge in Season 2, and now, as Forsyth described it in a BBC interview, redemption.But the pleasure of the show does not come from diagraming its moral lessons (unless that’s your thing), or from unwinding Forsyth’s sometimes maddeningly convoluted plots, which entangle sons and daughters of Edinburgh’s rough-and-tumble Leith district with the city’s gangsters, cops and politicians.What makes “Guilt” worthwhile is Forsyth’s knack for creating characters who work their way into our affections, less by their actions than by their unconscious, soul-deep responses to life in the grim confines of Leith and the promise of something better in Edinburgh’s more comfortable precincts.At the center of the web are Max and Jake McCall (Mark Bonnar and the marvelous Jamie Sives), brothers with very little use for each other who become bound in a seemingly endless cycle of lies, danger and recrimination. It begins in the opening minutes of Season 1 when Jake, with Max in the car’s passenger seat, accidentally runs into an old man, killing him. Jake, a gentle soul with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music (he could have wandered in from a Nick Hornby novel), wants to call the police; Max, a rapacious lawyer with a near-sociopathic lack of empathy, says no.This is the original sin for which the brothers are still paying. Covering up their hit-and-run homicide embroils them with the Lynches, a married pair of quietly vicious gangsters whom Max and Jake are both on the run from, and scheming to take down, across the show’s three seasons. While the brothers work together for survival, they are also at each other’s throats, taking turns ruefully betraying each other, leading to imprisonment, exile and worse.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Fire Country’ Star Max Thieriot Likes to Watch Things Grow

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      The “Fire Country” star talks about the road trips, the farm equipment and the family time that keep him grounded.For Max Thieriot, one of the creators and the star of the CBS series “Fire Country,” all roads lead back to his roots.He was raised on a vineyard off the coast of Sonoma in Northern California. And for a while, he lived nearby on 90 acres of his own with his wife and two sons.But “Fire Country” — about prison inmates joining elite firefighters to battle the region’s blazes in exchange for shorter sentences — shoots near Vancouver, British Columbia. So Thieriot, 35, moved his family to rural Washington, where his kids could continue to run around with the chickens and the goats.“I wanted to try and keep the same lifestyle for my wife and my boys, and not to totally upend their world,” he said.Alas, Thieriot still has wine in his blood.About 14 years ago, he and a couple of childhood friends started their own vineyard. The big lesson?“It’s much faster to do, and makes a lot more sense, when you have an entire crew,” he admitted before discussing the tractors, the road trips and the grapevines that keep him grounded.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Comfortable Problem of Mid TV

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      A few years ago, “Atlanta” and “PEN15” were teaching TV new tricks.In “Atlanta,” Donald Glover sketched a funhouse-mirror image of Black experience in America (and outside it), telling stories set in and around the hip-hop business with an unsettling, comic-surreal language. In “PEN15,” Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle created a minutely observed, universal-yet-specific picture of adolescent awkwardness.In February, Glover and Erskine returned in the action thriller “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” on Amazon Prime Video. It’s … fine? A takeoff on the 2005 film, it updates the story of a married duo of spies by imagining the espionage business as gig work. The stars have chemistry and charisma; the series avails itself of an impressive cast of guest stars and delectable Italian shooting locations. It’s breezy and goes down easy. I watched several episodes on a recent long-haul flight and they helped the hours pass.But I would never have wasted an episode of “Atlanta” or “PEN15” on in-flight entertainment. The work was too good, the nuances too fine, to lose a line of dialogue to engine noise.I do not mean to single out Glover and Erskine here. They are not alone — far from it. Keri Russell, a ruthless and complicated Russian spy in “The Americans,” is now in “The Diplomat,” a forgettably fun dramedy. Natasha Lyonne, of the provocative “Orange Is the New Black” and the psychotropic “Russian Doll,” now plays a retro-revamped Columbo figure in “Poker Face.” Idris Elba, once the macroeconomics-student gangster Stringer Bell in “The Wire,” more recently starred in “Hijack,” a by-the-numbers airplane thriller.I’ve watched all of these shows. They’re not bad. They’re simply … mid. Which is what makes them, frustratingly, as emblematic of the current moment in TV as their stars’ previous shows were of the ambitions of the past.What we have now is a profusion of well-cast, sleekly produced competence. We have tasteful remakes of familiar titles. We have the evidence of healthy budgets spent on impressive locations. We have good-enough new shows that resemble great old ones.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What to Watch This Weekend: An Experiment from Comedy Weirdos

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      Perhaps you would enjoy “Knuckles,” a Sonic the Hedgehog spinoff that outpaces its origin story.Wendy Whipple (Stockard Channing) and Knuckles (voiced by Idris Elba) in “Knuckles.”Paramount Pictures/Sega, via Paramount+What if I told you that midway through “Knuckles,” the new Paramount+ limited series based on the character from the Sonic the Hedgehog universe, there’s a mini rock opera featuring vocals from Michael Bolton? If that piques your interest, then you will find many things to enjoy in this show, which frequently feels less like an exercise in I.P. expansion and more like an experiment from comedy weirdos. There’s some strange sauce at work in “Knuckles,” which makes it overcome its crassly commercial origins to feel like a worthwhile watch for those in need of a quick and zany distraction.At its core, “Knuckles” is a spinoff of the two “Sonic the Hedgehog” movies about a blue alien who can go fast. “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” (2022) introduced Knuckles, a bright red echidna, sometimes called a spiny anteater, voiced by Idris Elba, who starts out as Sonic’s foe but turns out to be an ally. You don’t actually really need to know much of anything about the “Sonic” movies or Sega video games to enjoy “Knuckles,” however. There’s occasionally mention of Sonic lore, but it just serves as a backdrop to a bizarre buddy comedy.“Knuckles” finds the titular character teaming up with Wade Whipple (Adam Pally), a lowly deputy sheriff of the town where Sonic and his pals reside. Wade wants to win a bowling tournament. The deadpan Knuckles believes his quest worthy and promises to turn Wade into a “warrior.” (The theme song is Scandal’s very catchy “The Warrior” from 1984.)So, yes, “Knuckles” is mostly about a man and an animated egg-laying mammal with super strength venturing from Montana to Reno in order to bowl. Along the way they are pursued by some bad guys (Scott Mescudi, a.k.a. the rapper Kid Cudi, and Ellie Taylor) who want to trap Knuckles, but they also stop to have Shabbat dinner at Wade’s childhood home. There, Wade’s mother, played by Stockard Channing, teaches Knuckles about Judaism and the filmography of Julia Roberts.And then there’s the “low-budget rock opera,” directed by Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone, in which Wade enters a musical dream sequence dressed as Knuckles in a fuzzy mascot suit. He is accompanied by a chorus of dancing owls led by Julian Barratt of the British comedy group the Mighty Boosh. It’s a deeply absurd episode that feels right in line with the rest of Taccone’s work, especially the underrated film “Hot Rod” (2007).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Disney Scrapped ‘The Spiderwick Chronicles.’ Roku Saved It.

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      Canceled by Disney before it even aired, “The Spiderwick Chronicles” found a new home at Roku and has so far “delivered results beyond expectations,” its creator said.Last summer, the writer and producer Aron Eli Coleite was on holiday in Las Vegas with his wife when he received an urgent call from Nicole Clemens, the president of Paramount Television.Coleite was the showrunner on “The Spiderwick Chronicles,” a fantasy series Paramount was producing for Disney+. The show had recently finished production on its first season, but Clemens was calling with bad news: Disney had decided to pull the plug, effectively canceling the series before it made it to air.Without warning, “The Spiderwick Chronicles” was “being turned into one of those tax write-offs that I’d heard so much about,” Coleite said in an interview. Christine McCarthy, the chief financial officer for Disney, had said on an earnings call in May 2023 that Disney was in the process of a strategic shift that would lead to downsizing and cost-cutting across the board, beginning with the removal and cancellation of some shows on their streaming platforms. “Spiderwick” was a casualty of these cuts, and “there was no fighting against it,” Coleite said. (Disney declined to comment.)Clemens said in an interview that she was shocked by the move. “We’d started a second season, and there was a lot of love and excitement for the project,” she said. “It was like, whoa.”But after facing certain extinction, “The Spiderwick Chronicles” was rescued by an unlikely savior: The Roku Channel, the ad-supported streaming platform built into the company’s smart TV interfaces and stand-alone streaming devices. All eight episodes of “The Spiderwick Chronicles” debuted on Roku last week, joining the platform’s modest but growing library of original content, including the movie “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” and its reboot of “The Great American Baking Show.”So far the move has paid off: Roku announced on Tuesday that “Spiderwick” had the best first weekend of any on-demand title on the Roku Channel, in terms of total hours streamed. (The streamer also offers live channels and sports.) Roku declined to give specific numbers, saying only that “Spiderwick” was watched by “millions of streamers” in its first three days on the platform.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jimmy Kimmel Dunks on Trump’s Billion-Dollar Stock Bonus

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      “Donald Trump somehow made a lot of money from a company that makes none,” Kimmel said.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Taking StockFormer President Donald Trump is set to receive an additional stake in his social media company after Truth Social’s stock price stayed high and hit certain benchmarks. The additional shares were valued at about $1.3 billion.“It’s nice when good things happen to good people, isn’t it?” Jimmy Kimmel joked on Wednesday.“Donald Trump somehow made a lot of money from a company that makes none.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Honestly, how can this farting dementia patient be making a billion dollars on a company that has $4 million total in revenue? What kind of con artist Wall Street wizardry is this?” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (World Peace Edition)“Yes, Taiwan. Now, they’re not at war yet, but you’ve got to make a reservation in advance just to save your spot.” — JORDAN KLEPPER, referring to President Joe Biden signing an aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, calling it “a good day for world peace”“A good day for world peace? I’ve wanted one of those!” — JORDAN KLEPPER“I wonder what happened — did the nations of the world finally band together to outlaw war? Did they finally buy everyone a Coke? Is there finally peace between Kendrick and Drake? ” — JORDAN KLEPPER“Oh, ‘world peace.’ OK, is peace the one with the tanks?” — JORDAN KLEPPERThe Bits Worth WatchingThe Mexican singer-songwriter Christian Nodal performed “La Mitad” on Wednesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightKyle Chayka, a writer for The New Yorker, will discuss his book “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture” on Thursday’s “Daily Show.”Also, Check This OutNicole Kidman in “The Hours.” “She is fearless in the characters that she plays,” said the movie’s director, Stephen Daldry.Paramount PicturesThe filmmakers Baz Luhrmann, Stephen Daldry, Gus Van Sant, Jane Campion and Karyn Kusama discuss what makes Nicole Kidman a dream actor for any director ahead of her life achievement award from the American Film Institute. More