Television

What’s on TVCONTACT (1997) 7 p.m. on Ovation. Based on the 1985 science-fiction novel of the same title by Carl Sagan, “Contact” yearns to bridge the gap between humanity and technological advancement. Jodie Foster plays Ellie Arroway, a scientist devoted to finding extraterrestrial life, who picks up a radio signal from another planet. This garners national attention, and as Ellie decodes the aliens’ message, she must protect her work from those trying to steal or discount it. Ellie and a young minister named Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey) engage in a debate throughout over science and religion — and Palmer also becomes a love interest. “But try as it might to convey a humanist, mystical message and to equate the search for extraterrestrial life with religious faith,” Stephen Holden wrote in his review for The New York Times, “‘Contact’ is much more convincing when worshiping at the cold shrine of technology.”STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS 8 p.m. on CNN; 9 p.m. on CBS, ABC, NBC and FOX. President Trump will deliver his third State of the Union Address — the last of this presidential term. Mr. Trump’s first State of the Union Address focused on immigration policy, and his second — which was rescheduled because of a government shutdown over funding for a border wall — touched on looming Congressional investigations into his conduct. This year, the speech comes a day ahead of a final vote on his impeachment. What’s StreamingTOM PAPA: YOU’RE DOING GREAT! Stream on Netflix. The film, TV, radio and podcast comedian Tom Papa makes his Netflix debut with an hourlong routine filmed in his home state, New Jersey. In this special, Papa covers life’s simple pleasures: getting married, having two daughters, and living with the notion of being a parent. With asides about pets, climate change, social media and Staten Island, Papa assures viewers that we’re all just doing our best.BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY (2001) Stream on Hulu. Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. If Bridget Jones just loses 20 pounds and cuts down on alcohol, cigarettes and carbs, she’ll probably find (and land) the man of her dreams. At least, that’s her hope. Luckily, her current suitors — her charming boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), and her former childhood friend, the earnest Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) — assure our heroine that they like her for exactly who she is. Renée Zellweger, who adopts an unassuming British accent to play Bridget, was nominated for an Academy Award for her role. “Ms. Zellweger accomplishes the small miracle of making Bridget both entirely endearing and utterly real,” Stephen Holden wrote in his review for The Times. The movie’s sequels, BRIDGET JONES: THE EDGE OF REASON (2004) and BRIDGET JONES’S BABY (2016), will also be available for streaming. More

Jerry Jacobson swindled more than $24 million out of a major fast food promotion over 12 years. His trick: stealing and selling McDonald’s Monopoly game pieces.Jacobson’s fortune, and his downfall, came from gaming the twice-a-year promotion, which promised anything from a free sandwich to a million dollars to the customer who revealed the lucky game piece — a property, a railroad — when they peeled off the sticker attached to their hash brown wrapper or soda cup or the inside of a magazine.He was in charge of keeping the promotion secure, delivering the most lucrative game pieces to McDonald’s packaging plants. Instead, through most of the 1990s, he pocketed and sold them to a vast network of friends and distant relatives. In the end, more than 50 people were convicted in the scheme.“McMillions,” a six-part HBO documentary series premiering Monday, chronicles the scam and its unraveling. Here’s what to know before you watch.Who was involved?It was Jacobson who watched the winning pieces being printed, who locked them away in a vault, who sealed them up and tucked them in his vest and flew from factory to factory to hide them in McDonald’s packaging, according to The Daily Beast, which looked back on the case years later.Jacobson went into private security work after having served briefly as a police officer in Hollywood, Fla. His connection to the Monopoly game began when he and his wife at the time, Marsha, moved to Atlanta, where she began work as a security auditor. She helped her husband get a job with one of her clients, Dittler Brothers, which printed the McDonald’s game pieces. He later moved to Simon Marketing, a company in the same area, that produced the pieces.Soon, he started slipping the prize-winning pieces to people he knew, sometimes for profit. His stepbrother. His local butcher, who paid $2,000 for a stolen $10,000 piece. His nephew, who received a $200,000 piece in exchange for $45,000.Over the years, the fraud grew beyond his circle as he found other conspirators, usually by chance — which made them more difficult to pin down during the F.B.I.’s investigation years later. Jacobson, according to The Daily Beast story, said he met Gennaro Colombo, who claimed to be a member of New York’s Colombo crime family, at the Atlanta airport in 1995. Jacobson was waiting to board a cruise ship several years later when he met Don Hart, who in turn introduced him to Andrew Glomb at a dinner party. They became Jacobson’s accomplices, the middlemen who would sell the pieces Jacobson had swiped to various “winners.”How did it work?Jacobson came across the materials he needed by accident, according to The Daily Beast article. A supplier sent him a package by mistake, filled with the metallic tamper-proof seals — the ones used to secure the envelopes filled with game pieces that Jacobson was charged with delivering.In airport bathrooms — en route to packaging plants — Jacobson would remove the envelope’s original seal, swap out winning pieces for regular ones and resecure the envelope with one of the new seals he was sent.He would then pass the winning pieces on to Colombo and his other “recruiters,” who tracked down willing buyers and coached them through claiming their winnings. Colombo sold a $1 million piece to Gloria Brown, a friend of his wife, on the side of the highway for $40,000 in cash, Brown said in an interview with The Daily Beast. He then drove her to a McDonald’s, walked her through what to say and helped her lie about where she lived to avoid drawing suspicion — a surplus of winners was popping up in Jacksonville, Fla., where she and others connected to Colombo resided.How were they caught?In March 2000, according to The Daily Beast, the F.B.I. received an anonymous phone tip: Someone named “Uncle Jerry” was rigging the McDonald’s Monopoly promotion, stealing game pieces from the inside and selling them.Special Agent Richard Dent, based in the F.B.I.’s Jacksonville office, contacted a McDonald’s spokeswoman, Amy Murray, who began trying to verify the winners. One winner — Colombo’s father-in-law, who claimed $1 million from the contest — told Murray that he lived in New Hampshire, but property records in Jacksonville proved otherwise. Gloria Brown, Murray found, was also having her annual checks delivered to a Jacksonville address.Dent launched an investigation that would rope in 25 agents nationwide. He found his big lead in 2001, when he mapped out the addresses of three winners — all of whom lived within miles of Jacobson’s South Carolina lake house.Dent convinced McDonald’s to run one more Monopoly promotion, so the F.B.I. could track down the final evidence it needed. The move was fraught with legal risks — the corporation, in its collaboration with federal investigators, already knew at this point that its game was compromised.The decision paid off, allowing Dent to pin down Andrew Glomb for the first time. Colombo, though, died after a car accident in 1998. The F.B.I. arrested eight major suspects on Aug. 22, 2001, and charged Jacobson with conspiracy to commit mail fraud.What’s happened since?There’s a reason the scheme didn’t last long in the public’s memory: The trial, in Jacksonville, started on Sept. 10, 2001, and was quickly overshadowed by the events of Sept. 11.Jacobson, who declined to speak to The Daily Beast and did not respond to a request from The Times, said at his trial that he had stolen as many as 60 game pieces. He served 37 months behind bars and agreed to pay $12.5 million in restitution. Now in his late 70s, he still lives in Georgia.McDonald’s, through an instant million-dollar giveaway, tried to quietly make amends with customers.It was not the first time, or the last, that someone had gamed a competition supposedly decided by luck. In 1998, several years before Jacobson’s trial, an agent with Nevada’s Gaming Control Board was sentenced on a racketeering charge after designing a computer program that rigged slot machines in Las Vegas, Reno and Lake Tahoe.And in 2010, the director of information security at the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs the game in 33 states, wrote a computer code to manipulate the association’s random-number generators — producing winning lottery numbers that he could predict in advance.McDonald’s still runs similar promotions to the Monopoly sweepstakes, but the corporation has since created an “independent promotions task force” to prevent future copycats. More

If mild winters are making you pine for the days when it really used to snow in New York — or if you just have a taste for the dramatic vistas and peculiar goings-on of Scandinavian television — here’s a roundup of recent and coming series from the Far North. And we mean far: None of these shows was filmed below 60 degrees north latitude.‘All the Sins’Fans of Henning Mankell’s mystery novels, and of the British series “Wallander,” which was based on them, may feel comfortable in the confines of this Finnish series available through the PBS Masterpiece channel on Amazon Prime Video. The deep green and dark blue landscapes, a mix of tidy agriculture and ubiquitous water, recall the southern Swedish vistas of “Wallander.”And like many of Mankell’s stories, “All the Sins” is built on a specific Scandinavian social issue, in this case the power in northern Finland of Laestadianism, a stern offshoot of Lutheranism. As portrayed in the series, the sect’s strictness combined with its belief in the absolute power of forgiveness make it a good match for a story involving ritualistic murders and church-enforced cover-ups.The mystery is handled competently if a bit perfunctorily, with a typical gallery of suspects including an immigrant Iranian pizza maker, a fervent atheist and a skeevy businessman pushing a shopping-mall project. The real focus is on the byplay between the mismatched detectives: an uptight former Laestadian (Matti Ristinen) for whom the case is an excuse to skip therapy sessions with his boyfriend, and a middle-aged single mom (Maria Sid) with guilt issues — she killed her daughter’s father, for one thing — who self-medicates with loud and frequent sex.These two don’t exactly solve anything — they spend most of their time complaining, discussing responsibility and absolution and trying to manage their lives back in Helsinki by phone. The case is resolved less through detection than the accumulation of guilt and desperation, as Nordic an outcome as you could hope for.‘Arctic Circle’Set and, amazingly, filmed in northern Lapland — at a higher altitude than Iceland, or most of Alaska — this Finnish-German medical-conspiracy thriller goes about as far north as mainstream television gets. Through most of its 10-episode season (beginning Thursday on the streaming service Topic), the landscape is almost entirely white, the snow broken only by paved roads and scattered buildings. You have never before seen this many snowmobile chases.Matching its extreme setting is its plot, which mashes up contagion (the sudden appearance of a rare virus), human trafficking, suspicion of Russia and a love affair between a stoic Finnish cop and a dedicated German virologist. The overheated story and frigid locale recall the British series “Fortitude” (whose third season, not yet available in the United States, was filmed even farther north, on Svalbard). But the Eurothriller clichés in “Arctic Circle” are stitched together in even more haphazard and sometimes nonsensical fashion.It may be worth sticking around, however, for the show’s star, Iina Kuustonen, who makes the stock character of the local cop — coping with a deadbeat ex, a special-needs daughter, sexist co-workers and the big-footing of Finland’s version of the F.B.I. — entirely believable and appealing. (She’s ably supported by Venla Ronkainen, a young actress with Down syndrome, as the daughter.) If the “Avengers” franchise needs a Norse superheroine, she’d be a natural.‘Ragnarok’This six-episode Netflix commission is the balmiest show on this list: It was filmed amid the magnificent scenery of Odda, which is practically the tropics where Norway is concerned. It’s also, surprisingly, the only one with an overt environmental theme. The villains of the piece run the town’s paper mill, contributing to the climate change that’s shrinking the local glacier (and in the process exposing old secrets fundamental to the plot).And then there’s the biggest difference, which may help to explain Netflix’s interest: It’s a Scandinavian spin on a teenage superhero story, with a hunky but awkward high schooler (David Stakston) moving to his mom’s hometown and suddenly discovering he can throw a hammer for very long distances. This puts him on the radar of the town’s alpha family, an unusually polished and attractive bunch who are not, we soon find out, strictly human. That’s where the title “Ragnarok” — in Norse mythology, the apocalyptic final battle of the gods — comes in.“Ragnarok” was developed by the Danish writer and producer Adam Price, who created the highly regarded series “Borgen” and “Herrens Veje” (“Ride Upon the Storm”). It has a fluidity, and a canny balance between mordant humor and Gothic adolescent drama, that you’d more commonly find in a British or American series, and it’s not hard to imagine it on Freeform or the CW. But it’s better than that would suggest, or at least different — less slick, more serious about its ideas, more sensitive in its depiction of a lonely teenager coming into his own. And it helps make up for Disney taking back all those Marvel movies from Netflix.‘Twin’Norwegian twins, Erik and Adam, drive their camper to an empty beach framed by mountains — like a South Seas paradise north of the Arctic Circle — and pull out their surf boards, claiming the virgin break. Fast forward 15 years, and Erik’s still there, living in a shipping container and serving as a godfather and warning for the surfing camp that’s grown up around him: stay too long and end up a broke, middle-aged Nordic beach bum.The opening scenes of “Twin” (MHz Choice, beginning Tuesday) deftly sketch in Erik’s good-time, bad-news personality, with an emphasis on his irresponsibility and his resentment of Adam, now a solid citizen and proprietor of a local tourist hotel. Making Erik even more convincing, he’s played by Kristofer Hivju, who employs the feral, disreputable charm he gave the wildling Tormund Giantsbane in “Game of Thrones.”Hivju plays both twins, but not for long. In a twist that sounds melodramatic but plays out cleverly — it probably helped that Hivju and the show’s creator, Kristoffer Metcalfe, started working on the idea for “Twin” in film school more than a decade ago — the brothers have serious accidents within a few hours of each other. When Adam dies, Erik, who’s thought to be the dead one, reluctantly takes his place — at the urging of Adam’s wife, Ingrid (the excellent Rebekka Nystabakk, who’s really the show’s star).It’s a setup that’s legitimately noir, and suspicion is a major strand of the plot: A dogged young policeman (Gunnar Eiriksson) who looked up to the free-spirited Erik won’t leave the case alone, and Adam’s rebellious teenage daughter (Mathilde Holtedahl Cuhra) knows that’s there’s something off about Dad. And of course there’s a dark history, involving Erik, Adam and Ingrid’s shared past, to be doled out over eight episodes.But “Twin” holds your interest, and has some emotional heft, as a straightforward drama with elements of fish-out-of-water comedy. Erik, fresh from bachelor life in the shipping container, suddenly has a family, and his highly reluctant efforts to cope with that are funny and touching. And as a significant bonus, the series was set and filmed in the Lofoten Islands, a madly photogenic area of Norway (with an actual surfing scene) whose tourism revenue should be due for a serious bump. More