Television

What’s StreamingTHE WILLOUGHBYS (2020) Stream on Netflix. “If you love stories about families that stick together and love each other through thick and thin, and it all ends happily ever after — this isn’t the film for you, OK?” That line is delivered by the narrator in the opening of this animated movie (the voice, fittingly, is Ricky Gervais’s). Adapted from a satirical children’s book by Lois Lowry, “The Willoughbys” concerns neglected siblings (voiced by Will Forte, Alessia Cara and Seán Cullen) who hatch a plan to get rid of their comically inattentive parents (Jane Krakowski and Martin Short). The ensuing story involves chases, betrayals and many nods to famous children’s books — including the presence of a friendly nanny (Maya Rudolph) and a candy man (Terry Crews). “Though it tends to feel disjointed as a whole,” Natalia Winkelman wrote in her review of the movie for The New York Times, “‘The Willoughbys’ thrives when it embraces its grim plot and lets mischief reign.”CUNNINGHAM (2019) Stream on Hulu; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. Audiences who missed this documentary about the influential choreographer Merce Cunningham when it hit theaters late last year have new reasons to consider watching, given that live dance is on hiatus. “Cunningham,” directed by Alla Kovgan, mixes new filmed performances of old works (from 1942-1972) with archival footage, mostly eschewing a traditional biographical overview of Cunningham’s life and instead exploring the work itself. “The well-chosen selections in ‘Cunningham’ reproduce the variety of a Cunningham Event, and give the Cunningham experience of luminous instants,” Brian Seibert wrote in his review for The Times. Seibert called it “an excellent introduction to a great body of work that can be hard to get a handle on” — though home viewers will miss the 3-D technology that the film used in theaters.GOLDIE (2020) Rent on Amazon, iTunes and Vudu. The fashion model Slick Woods plays a Bronx teenager in this drama, Woods’s film debut. After her mother (Marsha Stephanie Blake) is arrested, Goldie (Woods) takes charge of her two preteen half sisters, searching for stability for them while pursuing her own dream of becoming a successful dancer. “Colorful as a box of Skittles, ‘Goldie’ (written and directed by the Dutch filmmaker Sam de Jong) turns its section of the Bronx into a world of pizza slices and hand-to-mouth cash deals,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for The Times. She added that Woods “gives Goldie a steel spine and a feisty resourcefulness.”What’s on TVWILL & GRACE 9 p.m. on NBC. When the original run of “Will & Grace” wrapped up in 2006, it ended its story with its titular best friends, Will Truman (Eric McCormack) and Grace Adler (Debra Messing), each married, and left them to live an apparent happily ever after. The show was revived in 2017. Wednesday night’s series finale will be the end of the new story line — and an answer to how to end a sitcom twice. More

Jack McBrayer has mastered the mind trip: the ability to transport himself anywhere but here. Which makes “Escape From Virtual Island,” a new Audible scripted podcast from John Lutz, his former “30 Rock” and improv colleague, a good fit. The premise: In 2038, guests live out their wildest fantasies through virtual reality at a South Pacific resort, where Beasley (voiced by McBrayer) is the long-devoted assistant to the owner (Paul Rudd). Then one adventurer gets lost in his imaginary world and needs rescuing.Recently, McBrayer was plotting a virtual escape of his own — his sun-soaked backyard in Los Angeles was standing in for a tropical island. Hummingbirds, soothing sounds and “comedy with some kindness” made his list of 10 essentials.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Saturday Cartoons and Sunday ComicsI was trying to think what were my earliest introductions to comedy, and I guess it would have been Saturday-morning cartoons. You’d have your Bugs Bunny, your Looney Tunes, your Hanna-Barbera. Then in the ’80s, every cartoon was based on a video game or a cereal or a popular show — “The Dukes of Hazzard,” Pac-Man. I eventually found myself in the world of improvisational comedy, and it reminded me of cartoons in that you could be any character that you want and you could be in any scenario that you want, and nothing mattered.When I was little, I wanted to be a cartoonist like in the funny pages. It was a Sunday-morning thing. Daddy would be reading the newspaper and then as soon as he was done with the funny pages, he’d pass them off and then I’d pass the section off to my sister. I don’t remember the last time I touched a real newspaper, but I love cartoons and will until the day I die.2. Hawaiian Music on PandoraSometimes you just have to pretend you’re on vacation, find the escape that you need and create it however you can. And for me it’s putting on a Hawaiian music station and relaxing and acting like you’re at a resort. I got first introduced to Hawaiian music when we were shooting “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” They had that piped into the hotel 24/7, and for some people I’m sure that would make them crazy. For me it was like a scalp massage. So on my most frenzied days, I’ll find myself pulling that up on the speaker system and just going back to 2007, laughing with Jason Segel and Mila Kunis. More

“Unreasonably dark joke,” read a coronavirus meme circulating on social media in recent weeks. “Shouldn’t we wait until after the pandemic to fill out the census?”The joke is dark, yes. But is it any darker than countless other coronavirus memes out there?Even more pointed is a spoof movie poster for “Weekend at Bernie’s,” the 1989 film comedy about two buddies toting around a dead man on their partying adventures, called “Weekend at Boris.” It cast as the corpse Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, who at that point was still in intensive care for Covid-19, as the corpse.Since the pandemic took hold, the internet has been awash with coronavirus-centric joke memes, Twitter wisecracks and self-produced comedy sketches shot with smartphones in shelter-in-place kitchens and living rooms. And that’s not counting what’s happening in private conversations during quarantine.Laughing while others die may seem inappropriate, even tasteless, like concentration camp prisoners cracking jokes during the Holocaust. But in fact many did, according to a 2017 documentary, “The Last Laugh.”Throughout history, humor has played a role in the darkest times, as a psychological salve and shared release. Large swaths of the population are living in isolation, instructed to eye with suspicion any stranger who wanders within six feet. And coronavirus jokes have become a form of contagion themselves, providing a remaining thread to the outside world for the isolated — and perhaps to sanity itself.But who, or what, is an appropriate target for satire during a pandemic?You can’t laugh at the sick or dying, obviously, except in the main. “A year from now, you’ll all be laughing about this virus,” reads one recent meme. “Not all of you, obviously.”The virus itself deserves scorn and mockery, being the source of all this misery, although it is an elusive target, being inanimate and invisible. (“I love being outdoors, crowded places and food markets,” read a fake Tinder profile for “Coronavirus, 29.”)As late-night hosts like Seth Meyers and Trevor Noah have shown, politicians who seem to prioritize votes over lives are easily mocked. So too are other perceived villains of the pandemic that require no microscope to see: six-foot-space-cushion violators, say, or toilet-paper hoarders.“What’s next?” Mr. Noah joked in a segment a few weeks ago about people getting into fistfights at supermarkets over jumbo packs of Charmin. “Are people going to be running around Walmart, like, ‘Ahhh, where’s the car wax?’”Judas on ZoomIn many ways, we are all our own best source of humor, racked with anxiety as we sit cloistered at home, surrounded by either too few people or too many. With little contact with the outside world beyond our smartphones, our jokey coronavirus memes and videos are like the S.O.S. messages that a bearded castaway fashions in the sand with rocks and seashells. More

What’s on TVSHE WALKS WITH APES (2020) 9 p.m. on BBC America. “As a kid, I was really desperate to find strong women role models that I could look up to,” Iulia Badescu, a Canadian primatologist, says in this documentary. She went through a Joan of Arc phase, and a Queen Elizabeth I phase. And then she found Jane Goodall. The documentary looks at the legacies of Goodall, Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas, three women who found fame doing groundbreaking primatology work in the 20th century. It explores the influence of their studies on three younger researchers, including Badescu. The documentary is narrated by the actress Sandra Oh.JANE GOODALL: THE HOPE (2020) 9 p.m. on National Geographic. For a deeper dive on Goodall, see this new National Geographic documentary, a follow-up to “Jane” (2017). “Jane” focused on Goodall’s formative years in the 1960s; “The Hope” looks at Goodall’s activist work from the 1980s onward.SEAT AT THE TABLE WITH ANAND GIRIDHARADAS 10 p.m. on Vice TV. The writer Anand Giridharadas, a former columnist for The New York Times, hosts this new weekly talk show, which covers news and culture. Wednesday night’s debut episode is set to include interviews with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Seth MacFarlane, plus a performance by Taylor Mac.What’s StreamingFAUDA Stream on Netflix. Doron Kavillio, the Israeli counterterrorism agent played by Lior Raz in this action series, spent the previous season of the show hunting a powerful ISIS follower — a story line that allowed the series to lean heavily into issues of politics and religion. The show has a new lead writer, Noah Stollman (“Our Boys”), for its third season, but the setup is familiar: It drops Doron in the middle of a dangerous situation freighted with the baggage of current events. The story begins with Doron undercover in a Palestinian village, where he mentors a young boxer (Ala Dakka) while hunting the boxer’s cousin, a Hamas operative. “As always with ‘Fauda,’ the story spirals out in increasingly messy strands of betrayal and violence,” Mike Hale wrote in a recent article in The Times.BUTT BOY (2020) Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. Yes, you read the title correctly. Yes, the movie is as weird as it sounds. This absurd dark comedy from the indie filmmaker Tyler Cornack revolves around a middle-aged man, Chip (Cornack), who develops a mysterious impulse that involves objects and his fanny. The situation escalates after Chip is asked by his local A.A. group to sponsor Russell (Tyler Rice), a detective working on a missing person case. Russell begins to suspect that the solution to his search lies within Chip. “No matter how weird or tasteless it becomes, the movie refuses to be dismissed as a juvenile provocation,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for The Times. “It’s too clever for that, too sympathetic toward addiction and grief, and too understanding of the loneliness of the unloved.” More