Television

With schools in New York and many other places closed or closing soon, there’s a good chance that you and your children are about to spend a lot of coronavirus-mandated time together. And let’s face it, not all of that time will be spent on remote learning. You’ll both need a break, and you’ll probably already be in front of a screen.There is, of course, a world of classic content you can explore together, from film masterpieces like “Spirited Away” (for rent at Amazon, iTunes, Google Play and other sites) to vital series like “Adventure Time” (streaming on Hulu). But if you would like to try something fresher, here are four shows, new this year, that you can enjoy discovering with your children, or at least tolerate while you nod and check your email. They’re roughly in order by target audience, youngest to oldest.‘Powerbirds’What “The Powerpuff Girls” did for kindergartners, “Powerbirds” does for parakeets. The premise is simple but cleverly executed. Whenever Max, a comics-obsessed teenager, is hanging out in his room, his pet birds Ace and Polly hop and tweet harmlessly in the background. As soon as he leaves, however, they start to talk — like the pint-size but intrepid crimefighters they are — and zoom down to the Command Coop, donning their superhero tights along the way.Their missions around the neighborhood are not of the super-dangerous variety — one short episode finds them scrambling to keep leaves from falling into the wet cement of a new sidewalk. But the show, created by the editorial cartoonist and children’s-book author Stephen Breen, gives the costumed parakeets a snap, humor and sophistication that you might not expect in a series aimed at preschoolers. That’s especially true with regard to Polly, a plucky dame out of a vintage Hollywood comedy who’s played by the animation veteran Tara Strong, the voice of Bubbles in “The Powerpuff Girls.” (Universal Kids, 10 a.m. Sundays; universalkids.com)‘It’s Pony’It’s the story of a girl and her horse, with a few contemporary twists: They live with her parents in a high-rise apartment building and it’s the pony who’s the nosy, needy, irrepressible attention sponge who constantly gets them into jams. (“I’m friendly,” Pony says. “It’s who I am. It’s never been a problem.”) The girl, Annie, and her friends are a wise and patient group who grudgingly accept Pony’s disruptions as the price of adolescence; the highly driven Annie, voiced by Jessica DiCicco (“The Loud House,” “Adventure Time”), is a little like a kinder-gentler version of Kristen Schaal’s Louise in “Bob’s Burgers,” with the snark level adjusted for early-tween viewers.The full-gallop 15-minute stories, involving Pony’s innocent derailment of school projects or the infinite forbearance of Annie’s parents, are brisk and charming. But the real attraction of this standout show, which was created by the British animator Ant Blades, is the art, with its heavily outlined, scribbled, brightly colored characters moving across lulling, watercolor-like backgrounds. “It’s Pony” is an urban tale and the New York-like cityscapes and apartment interiors are rendered with surprising depth and detail for a Saturday-morning show. And it has an absolutely addictive theme song (“Pony on the sixth floor, pony in the bathroom …”), which, for parents, may or may not be a good thing. (Nickelodeon, 11:30 a.m. Saturdays; nick.com)‘The Owl House’Yes, Virginia, there’s still a Disney Channel, even though the streaming service Disney Plus is getting all the attention at the moment. And this supernatural comedy for tweens is a good reason to seek it out. It’s a wisecracking, fast-paced, pop-culture-savvy coming-of-age adventure in a classic sitcom style, with hints of Matt Groening (in the imaginative monsters) and Seth MacFarlane (in the lightly cynical repartee, pitched, at a guess, for 10-to-12-year-old ears).A Dominican-American teenager, Luz (Sarah-Nicole Robles), stumbles into an alternate world where magic and an ambient ooze are facts of life, and humans are looked down on as talentless wastes of space. It’s a setup for mean-girl and gross-out humor, and for positive lessons as Luz struggles for acceptance and tries to learn magic. The show’s irresistible force, though, is the instantly identifiable, bourbon-soaked voice of the wonderful Wendie Malick, who plays Eda, the impatient witch who takes on Luz as an apprentice and all-around punching bag. (Disney Channel, 8:47 and 9:11 p.m. Friday, then on midseason hiatus; Disney Now)‘Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts’This 10-episode eco-fantasy comes from DreamWorks Animation and Netflix, and it has a visual sophistication that separates it from the other shows here. (The show’s provenance also brings in voice actors like Sterling K. Brown, Dan Stevens, Lea DeLaria, John Hodgman and GZA for supporting characters.) Its story, about a 13-year-old who ventures to the surface of a post-apocalyptic earth and finds overgrown urban ruins and a colorful variety of mutant talking animals, is typical teenage-adventure fare. But its artwork, an integration of practical American action and Miyazaki-inflected anime splendor, will keep you in front of the screen after your bored teenagers have wandered off. (Netflix) More

What’s on TVTHE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA 9 p.m. on HBO. Ed Burns and David Simon’s six-part adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel conjures an alternative history of the 1940s in which the United States takes a dark path under the sway of a popular demagogue. In the premiere episode, the tension is already beginning to build. Charles Lindbergh, a hero to many for his solo trans-Atlantic flight in 1927, foments anti-Semitic sentiment as he campaigns to prevent the United States from declaring war on Nazi Germany. Herman (Morgan Spector) and Elizabeth (Zoe Kazan), a working class couple Jewish couple in New Jersey, try to shield sons their sons Sandy and Phillip from the growing unrest while also wrangling with more mundane family issues. MY BRILLIANT FRIEND 10 p.m. on HBO. Spurred by the reported disappearance of the mercurial Lila, an aging Elena began to share the story of their transformative friendship at the beginning of the first season of this ongoing adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. The two met as girls in a poor neighborhood in 1950s Naples. Both were promising students but only Elena was able to pursue her education. Despite her talent and spirit, Lila was left behind to ply her father’s trade and eventually accept the marriage proposal of a suitor. In the second season, based on Ferrante’s “The Story of a New Name,” the ambivalent but deep connection between the women continues to develop as Elena’s academic success takes her further from her community and Lila’s troubled relationship crumbles.What’s StreamingTHE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1948) Stream on the Criterion Channel; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. This film noir by Orson Welles includes just about everything one might expect: stylized black and white photography, an alluring but destructive femme fatale figure, and a plot rife with misdirection and sudden bursts of revelation. Welles stars as Michael, a sailor conscripted into a yacht trip from New York to San Francisco by Arthur, a wealthy lawyer, and his wife, Elsa (Rita Hayworth). Michael hopes to win Elsa’s affection, and is drawn into a scheme to help fake the death of Arthur’s partner George. But the deal Michael makes is not what it initially appears. In the hands of Welles, a master filmmaker, these conventional elements are used to explore identity, truth and desire.THE RETURN (2003) Stream on Acorn TV. Julie Walters plays Lizzie, a recovering alcoholic who is released from prison after serving a 10-year sentence for killing her husband in a drunken haze. As she readjusts to life on the outside, Lizzie’s memory of that event begins to return and she realizes that she may not have been her partner’s murderer. There’s an investigation, plot twists and salacious details aplenty but this film focuses on its imperfect main character’s struggle to reconcile herself with a past that she largely wasn’t really present for. More

Season 3, Episode 1: Parce DomineThe opening sequence of the third season of “Westworld” naturally recalls the opening sequence of the first, when the wholesome rancher’s daughter Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) was still stuck in her loop, greeting beautiful days that typically ended in rape and murder. Now she remembers everything, including the 1 percenters who made her part of their bachelor weekends, and she’s finally in their world, leading an android vendetta that turns these people’s own technology against them. She can not only breach their security systems but also cue up a killer track from their Spotify playlists.The original idea of “Westworld” was that the hosts were more human than humans — too complex to be understood simply as machines, yet completely vulnerable to man’s worst instincts. Last season muddied that line of thinking, especially as Dolores was concerned. It was not clear how different hosts might respond to liberation, which offers the possibilities and moral responsibilities of being fully human, but it had the curious effect of making Dolores more remote and one-dimensional. The quest for revenge had flattened her out as a character and made her unrecognizable even to Teddy (James Marsden), who took his own life after she engineered the sweetness out of him.Among the many virtues of “Parce Domine,” the first episode of the new season, are distinct signs that Dolores may rediscover her earlier self. In the opening, she is still the righteous angel of vengeance, taking down a Delos mega-investor (Thomas Kretschmann) who didn’t limit his violence against women to the park alone. She has read his “unauthorized autobiography” in the Forge, so she knows everything he’s done, and she swiftly commandeers his high-tech security system, which turns his fortress into a prison. (“You want to be the dominant species, but you’ve built your whole world with things more like me.”)When she makes references to his own “loops,” it’s clear that humans are almost as easy to exploit in their home as the hosts were in Westworld.The subtle revelation in this episode, however, is that Dolores is going to have to come to terms with innocent people. The technicians and guests responsible for her oppression in Westworld are clear targets for revenge, but her assumptions about humanity at large can’t be safely extrapolated from there. Again and again, she is confronted by people who reveal other dimensions: Her first target’s second wife, who is now freed from domestic violence; Liam Dempsey Jr. (John Gallagher Jr.), who she wrongly presumes operates Incite, the insidious data-mining operation founded by his father; and Caleb Nichols (Aaron Paul), the construction worker and part-time mercenary crook who comes to her aid in the closing moments.The sum of these encounters is a promising sign for “Westworld,” which is attempting a hard reboot after a second season that often twisted itself in knots to stay ahead of the Reddit prognosticators. With the addition of new replicants and powerful algorithms this episode, the show will surely become its confounding self in due time. But Dolores is the character at the center of the maze, and it’s crucial that she restore some of the soul that has been coarsened by her relentless pursuit of robot justice. Otherwise, “Westworld” risks becoming an empty puzzle-box or leaning too heavily on supporting characters like Maeve (Thandie Newton) to carry that flicker of humanity.In the meantime, the change in location has given the show a boost. The future looks expensive, like a cross between “Blade Runner” and a credibly advanced version our own, filled with around-the-corner developments like driverless vehicles, smart houses, holograms and other sophisticated forms of automation. Dolores’s efforts to infiltrate Incite have the quality of a spy thriller, complete with automated-car-and-motorcycle chases, open-air shootouts and well-planted twists and double-crosses. After last season’s bloated, confusing finale, there seems to be renewed effort to inject fresh life into the show and emphasize action over talky philosophizing.Still, you can take the show out of Westworld, but you can’t take Westworld out of the show. Questions linger from last season about the host version of Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) and what she has planned for Delos, and the “pearls” Charlotte-bot sneaked out of the park will have to materialize, too.Then there’s Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), who starts the episode in hiding after getting blamed for the park massacre and ends it by commissioning a boat back to Westworld, for purposes unknown. “Westworld” 2.0 may have a gorgeous redesign and increased functionality, but it’s still the same ungainly hunk of hardware.Paranoid Androids:The seamless interactivity of the holograms is good for a couple of fake-outs this episode when it seems at first as if a flesh-and-blood human were present. This future society appears to have no shortage of advancements that will come back to haunt it.Dolores’s makeup (and Wood’s performance) makes her robotic nature stand out more in the human world than it did in the park. Her face and body have a glossy finish, and her movements in the action sequences read as distinctly nonhuman.Caleb’s turning to a disembodied therapeutic version of a fallen comrade plays up humanity’s reliance on simulated humans to stand in for the real thing, to the point where it’s hard to know the difference without asking. Again, another regrettable leap forward for mankind.Black-market crimes? There’s an app for that.Bernard’s doing his own diagnostic while hiding out on an industrial farm opens up new frontiers for self-deception: “Would you ever lie to me, Bernard?” “No, of course not.” Ask Elsie how reassuring that is.Pulp’s “Common People” isn’t the subtlest needle drop for a show about robots aspiring to be more human (“I wanna live like common people/ I wanna do whatever common people do”), but it has a propulsive future-sound that’s ideal. Sometimes the straightforward choice is the right one. More

There’s a repeating motif in David Simon’s passionate, gutting adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel “The Plot Against America.” A Jewish boy in early 1940s Newark is sitting in his bedroom when he hears an airplane overhead. Maybe it’s a warplane. Maybe it’s the president. Neither is a comforting thought.The president is Charles Lindbergh (Ben Cole), the famous aviator who, in this alternative past, defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 on a platform of antiwar isolationism laced with anti-Semitism, made nice with the Nazis and began a gradual program of persecuting American Jews in the name of assimilation.That airplane motoring overhead is a symbol of what Simon and Ed Burns’s dazzling mini-series so mightily conveys: the ominous approach of history from a vantage where you can hear and see it but can’t touch it. It can only touch you.“Plot,” beginning Monday on HBO, asks the audience to imagine the outlandish idea that the presidency might have been won by a celebrity demagogue new to politics who appeals to bigotry and fear, who ran on the slogan of “America First,” who boasts of having “taken our country back,” who sees fine people on the most reprehensible side of history, who cozies up to despots and behaves as if he were their puppet.Roth, who died in 2018, insisted that he did not intend “Plot” as a political allegory. But history doesn’t always care what you intend.In the 2020 version, Simon draws not a frighteningly different America — as in “The Man in the High Castle” or “The Handmaid’s Tale” — but a chillingly familiar one, both in its echoes of current fears and in its evocation of the past. The opening of “Plot” could be any remembrance of urban life just before World War II. Families gather for dinner, kids chalk up the street to play games, “Begin the Beguine” plays on the radio.Roth created an unsettling intimacy by writing his novel like a memoir, from the point-of-view of 10-year-old Roth — Philip Levin (Azhy Robertson) in the series — as his family suffers from the rise and triumph of Lindberghism: first open bigotry on the street corners, then official singling out from Washington.Simon and Burns trade Roth’s internal perspective for a third-person that captures the sweep of history as experienced by the whole Levin family. Philip’s father, Herman (Morgan Spector), an outspoken F.D.R. Democrat, unwinds by listening to Walter Winchell, the MSNBC of the anti-Lindbergh movement. Philip’s cousin Alvin (Anthony Boyle) is itching to take more direct and physical action.America’s turn to smiley-faced fascism hits home when President Lindbergh establishes Just Folks, a program to foster urban Jewish children with gentile families in the country — deracination disguised as integration — which attracts Philip’s rebellious older brother, Sandy (Caleb Malis). The program, ironically, is the brainchild of Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (John Turturro, with southern-fried smarm), an accommodationist convinced that Lindbergh has made anti-Semitic comments “out of ignorance” but regrets them “privately.”When Lionel begins dating Philip’s rudderless, impressionable aunt Evelyn (Winona Ryder), she clashes with Philip’s mother, Bess (Zoe Kazan), who is both more cautious than her hotheaded husband and less starry-eyed about their chances in a country of emboldened bigots.“Like it or not,” she says, “Lindbergh is teaching us what it means to be Jews.”It’s a frog-in-boiling-water situation, and Simon keeps a steady hand on the burner dial, patiently moving through the stages — denial, anger, desperation — of realizing that you are a stranger in your own country.The six-episode series builds to a fevered, violent climax. But arguably the most disturbing episode follows the Levins on a long-planned vacation to Washington, D.C. What should be a patriotic, educational family trip becomes a pilgrimage to the fallen monuments of a now-dead pluralism, a frightening recon mission into occupied territory. Herman, unable to stifle his disgust at what’s become of the country, is dismissed by pro-Lindy tourists as a “mouthy Jew.”It’s a depressingly believable horror story, an invasion of the body-politic-snatchers. Even Philip’s stamp collection becomes a symbol of what’s been lost: tiny portraits of the wide world and of America’s idealized past brought into one book, as America is slamming the door on that world and renouncing those ideals.“Plot” is a departure for Simon, who has not adapted a work of fiction before, yet it feels natural. Simon is an artist of granular realism, and the lived-in middle-to-working-class Jewish New Jersey he creates gives the series its power.The Levins are a family in full, not just plot-advancement devices, and Kazan and Spector are especially strong anchors. (The depictions of fictionalized historical figures — Lindbergh, Winchell, the anti-Semitic Henry Ford, now treasury secretary — are thinner.)Simon, like Roth, loves a good argument, and the ones here are all too familiar and believable. The accommodationists believe that they can guide the administration away from its worst tendencies. The resisters debate whether simply listening to the radio and getting mad counts as action, or if more active steps are needed.“Plot” is something of a thematic risk for Simon, too. His past work — “The Wire,” “Show Me a Hero,” “The Deuce” — is driven by the belief that individual acts can do only so much in the face of overpowering social systems. That might have made “Plot,” the story of how one man’s run for president might have nudged history off course, an uneasy fit for Simon’s philosophy, as much as it might mesh with his politics.Instead, he’s produced a translation that’s at once fully Rothian and fully Simonian. He hasn’t changed a lot in the story, but where he has, it’s to emphasize that the charismatic bigot in the White House is not simply an aberration who can be erased and forgotten like a bad dream. The problem is as much the passions and cynicism that made him possible: the citizens whose prejudice was validated, the officials who got a taste of thugocracy, the society that learned the norms of decent behavior were always optional, the minorities who found that equality is revocable.That merger of visions makes the difference between a dutiful adaptation of a great novel and a series that is great in itself. There is plenty of pugilistic optimism in this “Plot,” but it’s tough-minded. Maybe the clouds will part. Maybe the next plane to fly overhead will be a friendly one. But you will never feel as safe under that sky again. More