Television

What’s on TVTWENTIES 10 p.m. on BET. After Lena Waithe’s groundbreaking 2017 Emmy win — in which she became the first African-American woman to receive an Emmy for outstanding writing in a comedy series — the filmmaker Ava DuVernay posted to social media a photograph of a young Waithe balancing trays of coffee in the back seat of a car. It was a throwback to Waithe’s early career, in which she was an assistant to people in Hollywood, including DuVernay. That period of Waithe’s life provides the basis for her new, semi-autobiographical comedy series, “Twenties,” which centers on a 24-year-old aspiring television writer, Hattie (Jonica T. Gibbs) — though it moves the action to the present day. “This is our world post my character on ‘Master of None;’ it’s a world post ‘Get Out’; it’s a world post ‘Moonlight,’” Waithe said of the show in a recent interview with The New York Times. “This is the first time a masculine-of-center black woman has been the center of a show on prime-time TV.”DAVE 10 p.m. on FXX. The rise of a different entertainer is chronicled in this new series, which stars Dave Burd (a.k.a. the YouTube-born comic rapper Lil Dicky) as a fictionalized version of himself. The first episode begins in a doctor’s office, with Dave (Burd) giving a detailed description of his nether regions — a perfect litmus test for viewers deciding whether or not the series is for them. Burd’s co-creator, Jeff Schaffer (“The League,” “Seinfeld”), said in a recent interview with The Times that “the arc of the first season is, how do you go from having people view your video to being viewed as an actual rap artist?”What’s StreamingLIL PEEP: EVERYBODY’S EVERYTHING (2019) Stream on Netflix; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. A distinctive blend of emo and hip-hop shot the rapper Lil Peep to stardom, before his death from an accidental overdose in 2017 cut his career short. “Everybody’s Everything,” directed by Sebastian Jones and Ramez Silyan, offers a documentary look at the rapper’s rise. The film “doesn’t spend enough time on Peep’s lyrics and music-making process,” Ken Jaworowski wrote in his review for The Times. “And it was completed before a recent contentious lawsuit was filed by his mother against her son’s talent agency and label, whom she accuses of plying him with drugs.” Nevertheless, Jaworowski wrote, the documentary “is an engaging account of Peep’s life and the alt-music scene.”THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS (2009) Stream on Hulu and Netflix; rent on iTunes and Vudu. About a decade before he played a mustachioed Army man in Hulu’s recent “Catch-22” adaptation, George Clooney played a … mustachioed Army man in this dark comedy. Adapted from a book by Jon Ronson and directed by Grant Heslov, “The Men Who Stare At Goats” casts Clooney, Jeff Bridges and Stephen Lang as members of an experimental Army program concerned with parapsychology. Manohla Dargis called it a “likable, lightweight, absurdist comedy” in her review for The Times. More

Bobbie Battista, one of the original anchors of CNN Headline News and a veteran of various anchor jobs at CNN over two decades, died on Tuesday in Davenport, Iowa, where she lived. She was 67.A family spokesman said the cause was cervical cancer.After joining Headline News for its launch in 1982, Ms. Battista was promoted in 1988 to the parent Cable News Network, where she anchored coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, the gulf war and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.She became a familiar face in American living rooms, anchoring “CNN NewsDay,” “CNN NewsHour,” “CNN Daybreak” and “CNN PrimeNews.” She was voted best newscaster in Cable Guide magazine’s annual readers’ poll in 1986.In 1998, Ms. Battista began a three-year stint as the host of “TalkBack Live,” an hourlong weekday afternoon program that featured guest newsmakers fielding questions from a studio audience and from viewers participating by phone, fax and the internet. (It was canceled in 2003.)After more than 20 years with CNN, in the wake of AOL’s acquisition of the network’s parent company, Time Warner, in the early 2000s, she left to join her second husband John Brimelow’s firm, Atamira Communications, which advises corporate clients.Since then she had appeared on the satirical Onion News Network and worked for Georgia Public Broadcasting hosting a nightly news program called “On the Story” and another called “Generation Nation” before moving to Iowa.“Wherever I traveled around the world, people asked about Bobbie Battista, especially soldiers stationed overseas,” said Charles Hoff, CNN’s former deputy managing editor. “She was CNN.”Barbara Ann Nusser was born on July 23, 1952, in Iowa City to Stephen L. Nusser, who worked for Western Electric, and Bette Nusser, and grew up in New Jersey.After earning a bachelor’s degree in radio, television and film production from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., Ms. Battista gave news updates on a country music station in Fuquay-Varina, N.C., and occasionally filled in as a disc jockey there.She became an on-air host, producer and anchor at WRAL-TV in Raleigh, N.C., in 1976. The next year, she and Charlie Gaddy became the first male-female anchor team in the Raleigh-Durham-Fayetteville television market.In 1981, Ms. Battista was the writer and assistant producer of “Fed Up With Fear,” a documentary by a consortium of television stations on how citizens of five diverse communities were dealing with juvenile crime. The documentary won a George Foster Peabody Award.That same year she was recruited by CNN Headline News, which began broadcasting on Jan. 1, 1982, as CNN2.Her marriage to James M. Battista in 1975 ended in divorce. She is survived by Mr. Brimelow and a stepdaughter, Halie Brimelow; a brother, Michael Nusser; and a sister, Amy Nusser Dawkins.In 2001, Ms. Battista offered some advice to aspiring broadcast reporters.“You’ll have to be willing to go to a small town somewhere, and do your time in the trenches,” she was quoted as saying by People magazine. “There’s a lot of competition, and you have to work your way up.”“Or,” she said, “you can start at an entry level position” at a network like CNN.In either case, she said: “You have to love what you do. It’s probably one of the most rewarding fields you could ever choose to work in.” More

“Designing Women” is under renovation.Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the creator of that 1980s and ’90s sitcom about the employees of an Atlanta design firm, has reimagined the show as a stage play. The play, also called “Designing Women,” will bring the TV show’s characters into the present day. It will have its premiere this summer at TheaterSquared in Fayetteville, Ark.“What I really wanted to do was take those women as we last saw them and set them down right now,” Bloodworth-Thomason said in a telephone interview last week. “They’ll have the same history, be the same people, have the same attitudes, the same philosophies,” she added, “but they’ll be talking about #MeToo and the Kardashians, and Donald Trump, and all that’s going on right now.”The sitcom debuted on CBS in 1986. Its original cast was led by Dixie Carter, Jean Smart, Delta Burke, Annie Potts and Meshach Taylor. The show picked up numerous Emmy nominations over the course of a seven-season run, and was widely recognized for taking on tough social topics — including the AIDS crisis, which it addressed in a groundbreaking 1987 episode.“It was way ahead of its time on all sorts of issues,” Martin Miller, executive director of TheaterSquared, said in an interview, “whether it’s gay rights, reproductive rights, sexual harassment, gun control — a whole host of things that continue to be profoundly relevant.”The play is scheduled to run at the theater — which recently moved into a new, permanent building — from Aug. 12 through Sept. 13. A director will be announced at a later date.After its premiere in Fayetteville, the production will transfer to Alabama Shakespeare Festival and Dallas Theater Center. More information is available at theatre2.org. More

What’s on TVSUPER TUESDAY SPECIALS on various networks. One of the biggest days in the Democratic primary has arrived. Votes will be cast in 15 states and territories on Tuesday, with more than 1,300 delegates up for grabs. Several networks are prepared to guide you through the evening’s developments. At 6 p.m., political commentators including Rachel Maddow and Brian Williams get the ball rolling at MSNBC, while the news anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum start coverage on Fox News. At 8 p.m., reporters and anchors including George Stephanopoulos and Nate Silver offer analysis on ABC, while others report from voting locations and campaign headquarters. And over on NBC News, the news anchor Lester Holt and broadcast journalist Savannah Guthrie helm coverage as NBC and MSNBC correspondents on the ground weigh in. What’s StreamingTAYLOR TOMLINSON: QUARTER-LIFE CRISIS (2020) Stream on Netflix. Taylor Tomlinson, a 20-something comedian who cut her teeth in standup by performing in churches as a teenager, made her Netflix debut in a 15-minute special in “The Comedy Lineup.” Here, she gets the hourlong treatment to make the case that your 20s are not all that great, but rather a time to make mistakes and work on yourself before hitting 30. Or, as she gently puts it: “Your 20s are an opportunity to fish trash out of the lake before it freezes over.”THE TOXIC AVENGER (1984) Stream on Mubi; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu or YouTube. Over the next two months, Mubi is celebrating Troma, the prolific independent studio founded by Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz that specializes in outrageous B-movies. The first of six titles coming to the streaming platform is “The Toxic Avenger,” a cult classic about a janitor who falls into a vat of toxic waste and becomes a mutant that rids a fictional New Jersey town of corruption and evil.AILEEN: LIFE AND DEATH OF A SERIAL KILLER (2004) Stream on Sundance Now and Tubi; rent on Amazon and iTunes. In the early 1990s, the documentarian Nick Broomfield made “Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer,” a haunting look at Wuornos, a prostitute who, in 1991, admitted to killing seven men in Florida. The film surfaces allegations that Wuornos’s lawyer and adoptive mother exploited her case for movie deals. About a decade later, Broomfield followed up with “Life and Death of Serial Killer,” with the director Joan Churchill. The documentary revisits Wuornos’s troubled childhood and charts the courtroom saga that ultimately led to her execution in 2002. It does so through a sympathetic lens, raising questions about her mental health before her death. Wuornos’s life did in fact inspire a feature film, “Monster” (2003), which gave its star, Charlize Theron, her only Oscar. It’s available to stream on Tubi and Vudu. More