Television

What’s StreamingTHE VIRTUES Stream on Topic. By the time the kettle wails, Joseph is crying. It’s a couple of minutes into “The Virtues,” and Joseph (Stephen Graham), an Irishman living in England, is readying for a final meal with his ex, his son and his ex’s new partner, before those three leave to start a new life in Australia. That is the foundation of this four-part mini-series, the latest project from the British filmmaker Shane Meadows. “The Virtues,” written by Meadows and Jack Thorne, delves into loneliness, sexual abuse and trauma. It follows Joseph on a path of despair — and eventual reconciliation.STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER (2019) Stream on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. It doesn’t have Baby Yoda, but this most recent “Star Wars” movie has plenty of series staples to offer fans, including lightsabers and a heroic betrayal. Directed by J.J. Abrams, “The Rise of Skywalker” wraps up the dispute between the promising jedi-in-training Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Kylo Ren, the conflicted young villain played by Adam Driver. Here, the struggle of good against evil “feels less like a cosmic battle than a longstanding sports rivalry between teams whose glory days are receding,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times. “The head coaches come and go, the uniforms are redesigned, certain key players are the subjects of trade rumors, and the fans keep showing up.” Which, Scott added, “is not entirely terrible.”What’s on TVBLINDED BY THE LIGHT (2019) 7 p.m. on HBO Signature. “It’s like Bruce knows everything I’ve ever felt,” Javed (Viveik Kalra) says of Bruce Springsteen. It’s a somewhat unlikely match: For one thing, in this musical drama, Javed is living in the suburbs of London, a long way from New Jersey. For another, he’s the 16-year-old son of Pakistani immigrants. These differences between Javed and Springsteen are part of the point of “Blinded by the Light,” a coming-of-age story that’s both very 1980s and very timeless: Javed finds Springsteen, then himself. The film was adapted from a memoir by Sarfraz Manzoor and directed by Gurinder Chadha (“Bend It Like Beckham”), who infuses the story with Bollywood-style musical sequences and Springsteen lyrics that at times physically spring to life onscreen. “I didn’t want to make a jukebox musical,” Chadha said in an interview with The Times last year. “The film is about writing and words.”HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER 10 p.m. on ABC. After airing part of its sixth and final season late last year, this legal thriller series will return Thursday night for the first of its final episodes. Pieces of how the series will wrap up have been teased: Earlier episodes included flash forwards to a funeral for Annalise (Viola Davis), the law professor at the series’s center. But they also made it unclear whether she actually dies. More

This interview includes spoilers for Wednesday night’s episode of “The Magicians.”During the table read for the Season 5 finale of “The Magicians” — before the cast and crew knew it would be the finale for the whole series — executive producer David Reed turned to Sera Gamble, one of the three showrunners, and said, “This feels a little more optimistic than we usually are.”After all, past season-ending episodes had been cliffhangers about absolute disasters — main characters killed, terrifying new villains introduced, the supply of magic to the universe dominated by a fascist authority (or disabled entirely). This time, the showrunners backed off their usual m.o. of whipping out some radical maneuver and worrying later about how to tidy it up next season. Now, they took a gentler tack, allowing the sexually fluid Eliot (Hale Appleman) to finally choose an emotionally available partner, for example, and opening a door for Alice (Olivia Taylor Dudley), Margo (Summer Bishil), Josh (Trevor Einhorn) and Fen (Brittany Curran) to kick-start a new, improved Fillory, one with knife trees, bacon fields and naturally occurring pizza ovens. As Josh says, it’s all “perversely comforting” — not the usual “Magicians” tone, considering its ethos, that magic comes from pain.Gamble, who wrote the episode with Henry Alonso Myers, one of the showrunners, structured the script to work with or without a Season 6, leaving open the possibility of new adventures (and disasters). “Don’t worry,” she told Reed. “We can sprinkle a lot of pessimism on it in postproduction if we have to. We can make it a little more brutal.” But as it turned out, they didn’t have to. During a phone interview, Gamble and John McNamara, the show’s two creators, discussed bringing “The Magicians” to a conclusion, their unfulfilled narrative wish list, and the most real-world thing about the show, particularly now. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.For a show about magic, “The Magicians” has been surprisingly prescient. In order to save Fillory, they decide to quarantine Fillorians in a pocket world as they destroy the planet.SERA GAMBLE I was listening to a podcast deconstructing some of the rhetoric right now about where our priorities lie on the spectrum of trying to save the life of every American versus trying to save our economy. We didn’t know we were talking about the same issues regarding destroying Fillory. We all agreed that the right thing for Fen is saving the people and talking animals and unicorns. And yes, we mentioned pandemics, but we had no idea this was coming!JOHN MCNAMARA If we had pitched this story a year ago to Syfy, they’d be like, “Get out of here.” We’re living through something that not even a combination of Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut and Michael Crichton could have conceived: that the United States is the least capable country of dealing with a pandemic.In a weird way, Margo’s decision to sacrifice herself to save Fillory now feels like, “Huh, that’s an incredibly noble leader that we currently do not have.” Whatever I write with Sera next, it’s going to have a feeling of, the worst thing about a crisis is the person in charge.Could social distancing measures be considered a form of cooperative magic: the power generated when people in disparate locations do the same thing at the same time?MCNAMARA I like that idea. If I’m Zooming with five family members, that’s a form of cooperative magic.GAMBLE When we talked about cooperative magic in the mythology of our show, we used this word that people are using a lot right now: exponential. Exponential growth and power. If you get 10 magicians — or even regular people — all focused on the same thing, how much stronger is it?MCNAMARA Culturally, we’ve really embraced a somewhat self-destructive fantasy, which is the idea of a single superhero saving X — the city, the world, the girl, whatever X is. Historically, it’s almost never true. The greatest accomplishments stem from the group endeavor, from collectivism of some kind. John Adams didn’t write the Declaration of Independence. He encouraged Thomas Jefferson to write it, and then they all revised it, and in the movie “1776,” they sang a bunch of great songs about it. It was a collective experience of people who had huge philosophical disagreements, but one objective. That’s where I think collective, cooperative magic feels like one of the most psychologically and socially real things that we’ve done with “The Magicians,” because it reflects how we founded a new country, won World War II, got through 9/11, got through a pandemic. There was no one person who got us through 9/11; it was a collective consciousness, a collective kindness, a collective spirit.GAMBLE That’s what keeps me sane right now, focusing on all of the things people are doing for each other. I stay away from my neighbors now, yet I feel closer to my neighbors than I did a month ago, because we’re having the same experience. So I think about the idea of cooperative magic all the time, about the way that people are connected, even if we’re not literally holding hands.That’s where we came to in the last episode. The problems and the crisis continue, because they always do. You put the world together and it will fall apart again. But you have every confidence that Eliot, Julia and Penny-23 will stop at nothing to find their friends. You can fill in your own version of the epic tale of how our group find each other again, but it doesn’t rely on the relationships even being definable. It’s just they were alone and now they have each other. That’s the point we wanted to land most of all. It’s the way that we view the world, even if the writers’ room is full of people who look and sound and act like your classic fairy tale hero dude.MCNAMARA Well, to be fair, I look a lot like William Shatner during Season 1 of “Star Trek.”You’re only saying that because William Shatner is such a big fan of “The Magicians.”MCNAMARA It’s so true. Sera and I got to meet William Shatner. There had been a bit of kerfuffle over him live-tweeting nice things about “The Magicians,” and someone somewhere had tried to monetize that, and he got very upset about that on Twitter. We were mortified, because we had nothing to do with that, and said we would like to come explain that to him personally. He could not have been a more charming, attentive host. I have pictures of the three of us because I’m a total geek. They say don’t meet your heroes, but you should always meet your heroes.GAMBLE I was so star-struck, and getting to meet him as an extension of making this show was one of the crazier moments of my life.MCNAMARA He asked me, “Why are you wearing a suit?” “Because I’m meeting William Shatner.” He said, “Is it OK if I’m just wearing a T-shirt?” And I said, “Well, you’re just meeting Sera and John. This is no big deal for you.”Did you bring up the possibility of his doing a cameo on the show?MCNAMARA I’m sure we talked about it. But we were careful not to do stunt casting for the sake of stunt casting.Well, you have several actors who are completely unrecognizable. Sean Maguire this season, for example, was not only the Dark King but also Sir Effingham, thanks to the pig prosthetics.GAMBLE So what you’re saying is we could have had Mr. Shatner on the show and kept that hidden?MCNAMARA He played Ember. [Laughs] No, he didn’t. This is entirely our lack of imagination that we didn’t find the right role for William Shatner.I’m sorry to break it to you, but this is probably why you got canceled.MCNAMARA I wouldn’t doubt it. [Laughs]If you had the budget, what would you have done differently? What was still on your wish list?MCNAMARA I’m really bummed that we weren’t able to do a magical flying carpet.GAMBLE There would have been more dragons.We had a pitch for a place in Fillory called Cocaine Island, inspired by “Rick and Morty.”MCNAMARA Can I say the one that broke my heart? In last week’s episode, the original ending was that everybody from the heist starts singing their last song, the Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There.” They’re in beautiful harmony, having closure in their relationships.In walk Penny-23 and Julia, who had been on a separate story line with no music, and Penny goes, “We missed the musical?” And Julia goes, “Thank God.” I’ll always be bummed that we were not able to shoot that. God knows what Season 6 would have brought. Probably an opera. More

I am a little figure on a big green map.I’m wearing an orange jacket and a luchador-style wrestling mask with pointy ears, the outfit of my avatar in Pokémon Go, the augmented-reality smartphone game in which you catch, collect and evolve tiny monsters for points and prestige.All around me, stretching to the horizon, there are no-go zones. The grocery store I should avoid because of social distancing. The playground where parents are being advised not to let their toddlers touch the equipment. The city park where Brooklynites craving fresh air have been coming too close for comfort.My avatar radiates a small circle around it, denoting the distance at which you can activate in-game features. (Suddenly, the concept of having a circle radiating from your person — six feet to be precise — is universal, and a lot less whimsical.) The figure stands on a single, long rectangle, the house I live in. And that, pretty much, is where I stay.If you’ve ever played Pokémon Go, you know the problem here. Unlike so many video games, this one was designed to get you off your couch, make you move and bring you into the world. If you want to advance and find rarities, you need to wander and explore. To get the balls, potions and eggs you need (I could go into detail; I won’t), you visit “Pokéstop” stations and “gyms” placed at local landmarks.If you don’t go anywhere, you don’t get anywhere. “Go” is in the name, after all. And yet here we are, in the era of Stay.Before Covid-19, my continuing Pokémon Go habit was just a mild embarrassment. It was the ultimate dad move to still be playing a game that became a pop-culture sensation in 2016, when Hillary Clinton joked about getting voters to “Pokémon Go to the polls.”Now the app is one more reminder of what we’ve lost — the casual ability to just go places and have real-world experiences, including the ones mediated by an augmented-reality game.Pokémon Go had been a constant low-key part of my life, an ambient presence in the back of my head as I moved about the world. On city bus rides to school, I would pass off my phone to my son so he could catch Drowzees and Eevees for me on the trip. I do not hand around my phone so casually anymore.I’d open the game while on a morning run or at rest stops on family road trips. When I traveled, it was a kind of alt-GPS that I would use to discover new cities. I collected Pokémon the way other people would collect souvenir snow globes. A trip to Miami for a book fair netted a region-specific Corsola. Visiting Mexico City to give a lecture in February, I went running in Tlalpan National Park and finally nabbed a long-coveted Heracross.The game even has a social aspect of sorts, a “friends” feature that allows you to trade in-game “gifts” with other players. I have friends in New York, elsewhere in America, in Europe and Asia. I hope they’re doing well; the game allows for no communication except gift-giving.Lately I don’t go out and collect many gifts, so I don’t send many. The world, once a delightful bounty of serendipity and lucky finds, is now a scary place to retreat from.One silly game experience, of course, is hardly humankind’s greatest loss at the moment. But this is part of what the pandemic does: It makes even harmless, time-wasting aspects of life into ominous, sad triggers.Before our great sheltering, people would often bemoan that screen entertainments were replacing “real” experience. If anything, this has firmed my belief that virtual experiences are, in their own way, absolutely real. When you lose them, along with the physical world they’re layered over, the loss is undeniable.Once upon a time, the makers of Pokémon Go mainly had to worry about reminding ardent users not to trespass or crash the car while on the hunt. Now, they’re making it easier for us suddenly homebound players to amass a stash of balls, hatch eggs with less walking and lure critters while sheltering in place. A recent news alert in the app promised “updates to Pokémon Go features and experiences that can be enjoyed in individual settings.”It’s nice. It helps. It also helps that there are ways of playing without leaving home, like a “battle league” feature that allows you to pit your Pokémon against other monster teams from around the world.But that’s not the game. The game is catching them all, hunting, exploring, moving. My weekly progress meter — which measures my walking for in-game rewards, in communication with my Apple Watch — would regularly log over 50 kilometers in a typical week. Last week I barely cracked 20. (Mostly, I assume, nervous pacing.)Still, I play. I see what creatures are lurking near my house. Occasionally, I see if the coast is clear and dash down the block to spin my local Pokéstop. In a stressful time, even the attenuated game is a distraction and a comfort.But it’s also a reminder of what Pokémon Go used to give me, and the one thing it can no longer deliver no matter how much it tweaks its code: the whole wide world. More

There’s no getting around it: Most of us won’t be traveling for a good, long while. There are certainly more pressing concerns — personal health, supply lines, stocking the pantry, caring for the children — but the anticipation and inner peace of an upcoming vacation, a family gathering, or a trip abroad have now disappeared, and who knows for how long. It’s neither safe nor (increasingly) possible to visit Norway or Brazil or France or anywhere else when you’re stuck in your home.But maybe it is. One of the genuine delights of the streaming era is the degree to which it has made international television available, and readily too — with scores of shows streaming on Amazon, Hulu, HBO and (especially) Netflix. Sprinkle in an assortment of travelogues and you can go all over the world, from the comfort (and confines) of your couch. Here are some of the best shows for treating cabin fever:‘Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations’Streaming on Hulu.Any respectable world television tour should begin with Anthony Bourdain’s globe-trotting food and travel docu-series, in which the late, great celebrity chef visits places large and small, from Singapore to Saudi Arabia to Sweden, taking in the local cuisine, culture and citizens. (And he doesn’t slouch on the scenery, either — the series twice won the Emmy award for Outstanding Cinematography for Nonfiction Programming). Over the course of its nine-season run, it became clear that Bourdain wasn’t just out to see sights or swipe recipes; the show seemed like his personal mission to correct the Ugly American stereotype, and to remind us that when we’re abroad, we should aim to be travelers rather than tourists. (Read The New York Times review.)‘Somebody Feed Phil’Streaming on Netflix.“Food is the great connector,” says Phil Rosenthal, “and laughter is the cement.” This Netflix original often plays like a comic riff on “No Reservations” (though that show is frequently funny itself), as the nebbish “Everybody Loves Raymond” creator travels to Lisbon and Buenos Aires and other places around the globe, in an attempt to “go to the source” of some of his favorite foods — and take in the world in the process, with most of the show’s laughs generated by the incongruity between his markedly urban American persona and the kind of “roughing it” often required by these locales.‘Travel Man: 48 Hours In …’Streaming on Hulu.There’s a long, rich tradition of British comedians “presenting” travel programs, from Michael Palin’s marvelous BBC docu-series (“Around the World in 80 Days,” “Pole to Pole,” “Full Circle,” etc.) to the ongoing “Trip” series (to northern England, Italy, Spain and Greece) with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon to this Channel 4 treat, in which the comic actor and director Richard Ayoade (“The IT Crowd”) visits the great cities of the world for 48 hours with a celebrity guest. The results are enjoyable as both a travel series and a parody of them; Ayoade and his friends hit the must-see sights and capture the beauty of these hot spots, but also detour to goofier locations, indulging in wry commentary and awkward interplay.‘Our Planet’Streaming on Netflix.Narrator David Attenborough and the team behind his acclaimed BBC series “Planet Earth” spent four years crafting this eight-part Netflix original with two purposes: to celebrate the world we inhabit, and to note the disruptions and dangers that have entered its ecosystems. That message remains vital, but the show’s sense of wonder and powerful visuals are not to be denied and, as the entire series was shot with 4K cameras — taking in images of Indonesian jungles, Central African Deserts, the forests of Madagascar, the Atlantic Ocean and the Arctic on a big flat screen — this is about as close as you’re going to get to the real thing. (Read The New York Times review.)‘Sense8’Streaming on Netflix.From “The Matrix” trilogy to “Cloud Atlas,” the Wachowskis have never lacked in ambition, and their two-season Netflix series has exotic locations built into its premise, which connects eight strangers in eight cities with each others’ lives and worlds. In telling that story, they covered as much ground as any travel show, with breathtaking photography in Mumbai, London, Seoul, Nairobi, Mexico City, Berlin, Naples, Malta, Amsterdam, São Paulo and many, many more places. (Read The New York Times review.)‘The Night Manager’Streaming on Amazon Prime.When the screenwriter David Farr and the director Susanne Bier adapted John le Carré’s 1993 spy novel for television, they not only updated the time period, but tweaked the locations — shooting the sleek, glossy tale in Switzerland, Marrakesh and Spain (of particular note: a gorgeous Spanish villa for the villain Hugh Laurie). The le Carré purists may object, but the rest of us will be too busy luxuriating in the Continental flavor and sun-soaked photography. (Read The New York Times review.)‘Killing Eve’Streaming on Hulu.Spy shows and films generally hopscotch around the globe, which makes them especially ripe for wanderlust viewing, and though the smash BBC America adaptation of Luke Jennings’ “Villanelle” novels is, in many ways, a subversion of the spy series conventions, one must often embrace those tropes to send them up. So the MI6 agent Eve Polastri must trek from London to such locales as Tuscany, Berlin, Bucharest, Paris, Amsterdam, Rome and other places in her pursuit of the high-level assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer). (Read The New York Times review.)‘Wallander’Streaming on Hulu and BritBox.Henning Mankell’s series of detective novels, previously adapted into films and a series for Swedish television, are here dramatized by British TV with the quintessentially British actor Kenneth Branagh in the role. But the series keeps the original Swedish setting, and to great effect; Times critic Mike Hale praises the show’s use of “the stark, flat expanses of the southern Swedish coast, with their shimmering fields and lonely trees outlined against big blue-gray skies.” (Read The New York Times review.)‘Occupied’Streaming on Netflix.And from here our world tour takes us to Norway, for this ongoing series from the minds behind such archetypal Scandinavian crime films as “Insomnia” and “Headhunters.” This fast-paced political thriller, in which high-minded Norwegian government officials cease production of oil and gas in the face of climate change, only to find their country occupied by Russian forces, offers up not only the snowy landscapes we’ve come to expect, but plenty of urban portraiture as well. (Read The New York Times review.)‘Babylon Berlin’Streaming on Netflix.Next stop: Germany, for this extravagantly mounted, neo-noir series, set during the city’s pre-Hitler, Weimar Republic era. The production — reportedly the most expensive in German TV history — leans heavily on a giant, permanent standing set at the Babelsberg Studio, but also uses copious locations throughout the city (and country), including the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, the Berlin City Hall, the Protestant Church of the Redeemer,and the Bavarian Railway Museum. (Read The New York Times review.)‘Dark’Streaming on Netflix.On the other hand, if you’d like to visit small-town Germany in the present day (sort of), we can pay a visit to the forest village of Winden, the setting for this dizzyingly complicated and moodily atmospheric Netflix original. Winding together four families and three generations of tragedies — kidnappings, suicides, murders — that often converge in the dark and scary woods, this one is frightening enough to make you feel all right about staying indoors. (Read The New York Times review.)‘Call My Agent!’Streaming on Netflix.The French film industry gets the “Curb Your Enthusiasm”/“Extras” treatment with this inside-showbiz satire, mixing real stars of their big and small screens with the fictional exploits of a rapidly splintering and highly dysfunctional talent agency. The takeaway is that the machinery that keeps things running behind the scenes is far from glamorous (it’s petty, gossipy and back-stabbing), but there’s still plenty of screen time for the glam, and many opportunities to gawk at the Parisian scenery and high-powered red carpets. (Read The New York Times review.)‘My Brilliant Friend’Streaming on HBO.Some series float through their locations, only making fleeting connections. But HBO’s ongoing adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels isn’t just set in Italy in the 1950s; it’s dug in there, intimately aware of every stairwell, courtyard and apartment in its working class neighborhood. It’s a setting, James Poniewozik writes, “where everyone is packed close and prying eyes and whispers are inescapable.” But the series also offers gorgeous glimpses of the world outside that neighborhood, of an upper-crust area of Naples, or a resort island. It’s a welcome reminder that even when things are bleak, escape is still possible. (Read The New York Times review.)‘Kingdom’Streaming on Netflix.And on we travel, both around the globe (to South Korea) and back in time (to the 16th century) for this Netflix original, gleefully mixing historical drama, zombie horror, swordplay, political satire and (gulp) contagion thriller — and mounted on a grand scale, with big, colorful action sequences carefully choreographed in gorgeous forests and rolling vistas. Mike Hale picked it as one of the best international shows of the decade, and praised the “rousing” series for its “rich production values.” (Read The New York Times review.)‘Giri / Haji’Streaming on Netflix.And we land in both London and Tokyo for this recent Netflix addition (a pickup from BBC Two), a cross-cultural story of a Tokyo detective (Takehiro Hira) attempting to track down his gangster brother in the criminal underworld. Aiding him in the search — as best she can — is a London police detective (Kelly MacDonald), whose perpetual mood seems to take its cues from the city: cold and gray. But the show also beautifully captures the neon glow of these cities at night, when the respectable citizens clear the streets, and things start getting interesting.‘Outlander’Streaming on Netflix and Starz.There’s a strange circularity about watching (or, likely, rewatching) Starz’s adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s books for the scenery — since a fair number of its enthusiastic viewers have gone to central Scotland for the primary purpose of visiting its locations. And they’re gorgeous, rolling hills and venerable castles and foggy marshes and leafy forests, offering even more escape than we were already enjoying from this tale of a 1940s woman inexplicably zapped into 18th-century Scotland. And she does what we’re all trying to do: she makes the best of it. (Read The New York Times review.)‘Black Sails’Streaming on Hulu.By the time this thing is over, we may not even want to be landlocked anymore — and there’s no better show for taking to the high seas than Starz’s four-season pirate adventure/drama, presenting the origin story of Long John Silver. Though set in the West Indies circa 1715, the series was shot in South Africa, which convincingly doubles for the region; the blue waters are crystal clear, and the beaches would be irresistibly inviting were it not for all those pesky pirates. (Read The New York Times review.)‘Fortitude’Streaming on Amazon Prime.And finally we land at the top of the world — well, close to it, on the Arctic island of Fortitude, setting of this Sky Atlantic mystery/thriller series. Fortitude, however, is a fictional location (that’d be just a bit too nice and neat), so the three-season series was shot in Iceland and Norway; its icy glaciers and snow-capped mountains could come in handy if we’re still indoors this summer. (Read The New York Times review.)Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. More