What’s on TV Sunday: ‘Homeland’ and ‘High Maintenance’
What’s on TVHOMELAND 9 p.m. on Showtime. Carried by Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison, a bipolar C.I.A. officer, and Mandy Patinkin as Saul Berenson, her mentor, this series begins its final run. When the show began in 2011, a decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, Carrie was investigating a POW-turned-al-Qaeda-agent, who later became her lover. In battling the effects of the war in Afghanistan — a conflict that has lasted a generation — “Carrie was a kind of synecdoche for a rattled America,” James Poniewozik wrote in his review for The New York Times. “She both fought the shadow war for us and felt it,” he added. Now, in its eighth season, “Homeland” puts Carrie back in Afghanistan after months of Russian confinement. With the resurfacing of some Season 1 characters, the season places emphasis on Carrie and Saul’s relationship over the years.THE 92ND ACADEMY AWARDS 8 p.m. on ABC. The 2020 Oscars will forgo a host for the second year in a row, citing success from last year’s awards after Kevin Hart became enmeshed in controversy. Several nominees for the best picture title, including “Little Women” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” are period pieces. Among the nominees for best director are Sam Mendes for “1917” and Bong Joon Ho for “Parasite,” which is the only foreign film nominated in the best picture category.What’s StreamingHIGH MAINTENANCE Stream on HBO and Hulu. Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes and YouTube. This narrator-free third-person series, which began on Vimeo before moving to HBO in 2016, is back for its fourth season on the platform. “High Maintenance,” at its most simple, is about a beloved, nameless pot dealer known as The Guy who, as he bikes around New York, is “a temporary friend-shrink-rabbi,” James Poniewozik wrote in his review of Season 1. But in the bigger picture, it’s a show about the lives and neuroses of New Yorkers, threaded together by The Guy with pot as a mere catalyst for their stories. “‘High Maintenance’ has a wide ambit,” Willy Staley wrote for The Times, “and its vignette-based structure provides it the freedom to depict New York more accurately and fully than anything that has come before it.”GHOST (1990) Stream on Hulu. Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. Molly Jensen’s (Demi Moore) life is shaken when her lover, Sam Wheat (Patrick Swayze), is suddenly killed in a violent mugging. But instead of moving to the next world, Sam becomes a ghost, and he’s incredibly confused by the situation at hand. As he learns the ways of partial existence (how to move objects and walk through doors, for example), he realizes he cannot communicate with his beloved — so he finds himself a psychic who can. Oda Mae Brown (Whoopi Goldberg) makes it her mission to help Sam connect with Molly, warn her of impending danger and enact revenge on his killer. More
