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    ‘Deli Boys,’ Plus 9 Things to Watch on TV this Week

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    A new Hulu comedy premieres, “The Righteous Gemstones” are back and “The Traitors” wraps up its third season.Between streaming and cable, there is a seemingly endless variety of things to watch. Here is a selection of TV shows and specials that air or stream this week, March 3-9. Details and times are subject to change.Things aren’t going as expected.On the Hulu thriller “Paradise,” things took an unexpected turn right from the beginning — and have only gotten more twisty from there. The show follows Xavier Collins, a secret service agent played by Sterling K. Brown who is in charge of protecting President Cal Bradford (James Marsden). Slight spoilers ahead: The end of the first episode showed that Xavier, Cal and a few lucky civilians have been living in an underground city after the world ended — and that the president is actually dead. In a series of flashbacks, the rest of the episodes have revealed how things got to where they are, and this week’s finale will reveal who killed the president. Streaming Tuesday on Hulu.Netflix’s lush historical drama “The Leopard” follows the Salina family, Sicilian aristocrats who are bracing for the Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Redshirt guerrillas to conquer the island in the 19th century. The 1958 book, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, became one of the highest selling novels in Italy. If not for a look at the history, tune in for the stunning location and enviable outfits. Streaming on Wednesday on Netflix.What happens when you have been raised in the cushy world of wealth but your father’s death has left nothing but his convenience store empire, which is actually a crime front? “Deli Boys,” a new comedy, answers that question. Asif Ali and Saagar Shaikh star as brothers who are trying to maintain a deli counter while also dealing with a Peruvian cartel and the Italian mafia. Streaming Thursday on Hulu.An inside look at sports.It’s no secret that Boston takes their sports seriously. The new documentary series “Celtics City” transports viewers back to the founding of the Boston Celtics N.B.A. team in 1946 and forward to their championship win in 2024. The show features archival footage and interviews with past and present players, including Bob Cousy, Larry Bird, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. Monday at 9 p.m. on HBO and streaming on Max.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Eastern Gate’ Is a Lean and Mean Spy Drama

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      Office politics are global politics in this intense Polish series on Max.Nothing is fair in love or war in the fast-paced Polish spy drama “The Eastern Gate” (in Polish and Russian, with subtitles or dubbed). The show, on Max, is intense, tricky and surprising. “Don’t trust anyone,” the characters constantly warn one another. And, well — don’t.Ewa (Lena Gora) is a Polish spy, and at the outset she is undercover at a glamorous party. Only she isn’t there to hobnob with her boyfriend’s icy mom, she is there to gather information about said mom’s involvement in nuclear bomb making.A lot of shows begin with scenes of shocking violence, but few stick with it the way “Gate” does. Outside of “Cobra Kai,” I’m not sure there’s a show with more kicking. Oh, there’s punching, eyeball-squishing, wrist-wrenching and plenty of shooting, too, but all the ways people can kick or be kicked are on vicious display here. It’s not morbid or gratuitous, though: It’s part of the show’s percussive insistence, heard also in its hostile knock-knock-knocks on car windows or in the startling clack of a bolt in lock.The initial mission does not go exactly to plan, and in the fallout Ewa gets sent to Minsk, Belarus, where her bosses suspect a leak within their own intelligence program. How do you look over your shoulder and listen to the voice in your earpiece all at once? The show is set in 2021, and Ewa et al.’s espionage work focuses on the relationships between Poland, Belarus and Russia, and on managing Russian influence as crises deepen and the body count grows.Office politics are global politics here, and international conflict is just an embodiment of interpersonal conflict: Sniffing out Russian moles and arguing about NATO policies are Ewa’s and her colleagues’ love language. Or maybe not “love,” but … maybe. On one mission, Ewa’s handler tells her the safe word is “Don’t hurt me.” When an intelligence official bungles an operation, his boss snarls, “I’ll start a [expletive] war against you myself.”“Gate” is lean and mean in the best ways. All the logs are going on the same fire here, and the heat does not abate. Three of its six episodes are available now, and new episodes on arrive Fridays. More

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      HBO Ends Partnership With ‘Sesame Street’

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      The venerable children’s series must find a new home after about a decade on HBO and its streaming service, Max. Old episodes will be available through 2027.“Sesame Street” is relocating.Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit company that makes the venerable children’s educational program, is looking for a new distribution partner after Warner Bros. Discovery decided not to renew its agreement to air new episodes of the show on HBO and its streaming platform, Max.Max said the decision was part of a broader corporate shift away from children’s programming. The 55th season of “Sesame Street” — featuring Big Bird, Elmo, Cookie Monster and other colorful Muppets — will be the last to arrive on Max, in January. Old episodes will remain available through 2027.“Based on consumer usage and feedback, we’ve had to prioritize our focus on stories for adults and families,” a Max spokesman said. “And so new episodes from ‘Sesame Street,’ at this time, are not as core to our strategy.”Sesame Workshop partnered with HBO in 2015, granting the premium cable outlet a nine-month window of exclusivity for new episodes. Under the agreement, the episodes were later broadcast for free on PBS, which has aired “Sesame Street” since 1970.The deal provided a significant cash infusion for Sesame Workshop, which expanded its production schedule to 35 episodes a year from 18. It is unclear which platform might pick up the series, but contenders could include Apple TV+ (which aired three seasons of “Helpsters,” another Sesame Workshop children’s series), Netflix and Amazon.“We will continue to invest in our best-in-class programming and look forward to announcing our new distribution plans in the coming months,” a spokesman for Sesame Workshop said in a statement.Sesame Workshop and HBO have been accused of contributing to inequality by allowing families who can afford premium cable to get new episodes of the show before others. In 2022, nearly 200 episodes of the show were pulled from Max.“HBO is holding hostage underprivileged families from having access to timely first-run episodes of perhaps the single most educational children’s franchise in the history of electronic media,” Tim Winter, who was then the president of the Parents Television Council, said in a statement in 2019. More

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      ‘The Confidante’ Is a Layered French Drama About a Heartbreaking Scam

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      Streaming on Max, the series tells the story of woman who lies to a grief support group about her connection to the Paris terrorist attacks of 2015.Laure Calamy stars in “The Confidante.”MaxThe four-part French mini-series “The Confidante,” beginning Friday, on Max (in French, with subtitles), is based loosely on a true story and follows a woman named Chris (Laure Calamy), who claims falsely that her best friend was a victim of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. Chris ingratiates herself into a survivors’ support network, providing real time and energy but also catfishing other members and committing fraud. She posts constantly on Facebook, offering herself as a shoulder to cry on, fielding texts, chats and calls from bereaved, traumatized — legitimate — victims.“Confidante” keeps its focus tight, with only slivers of Chris’s previous grifts creeping into the narrative — just enough to feel like half remembered rumors. We see Chris’s pain and vulnerability, the shabby ways some people treat her. And we also see her shamelessly scam cabdrivers and bartenders.In one of the show’s knottiest, most striking scenes, members of the support group join Chris at the hospital to visit “Vincent,” her comatose friend. They promise an unconscious Vincent that they care about him, they’re waiting for him. We, and Chris, know the man in the bed is not Vincent but rather a random victim whose room she weaseled into weeks earlier. What does one make of a misdirected vigil?Chris often blasts music on her headphones, which we hear in tinny second hand. A man sighs that everyone in Paris is connected to a victim somehow, given the scale of the attack. Another man, whose wife survived the attack, describes the second-degree trauma he and his son experience from watching her suffer. “Confidante” layers these moments carefully to build Chris’s psyche: Just because you’re not wearing the headphones doesn’t mean you can’t hear the music, right? Just because it didn’t happen to Chris the way she said doesn’t mean it didn’t happen in the broader sense, right? … Right?Well, no, of course not. “Confidante” subtly, effectively depicts how a fraud turns everything inside out. What seemed like generosity was selfishness. What seemed like support was damage.“The Confidante” kicks off a little social fraud boomlet in the coming days: “Anatomy of Lies,” “Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare” and “Scamanda” all premiere next week, and all follow outrageous, compounding scams. Those are all documentaries, and what a fictionalized drama can offer that ripped-from-the-podcast docs can’t is a real evocation of the present tense, the part before ruefulness, the part where it all feels true. More

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      How Everyone Got Lost in Netflix’s Endless Library

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      If you take a journey deep within Netflix’s furthest recesses — burrow past Bingeworthy TV Dramas and 1980s Action Thrillers, take a left at Because You Watched the Lego Batman Movie, keep going past Fright Night — you will eventually find your way to the platform’s core, the forgotten layers of content fossilized by the pressure from the accreted layers above. Down here, if you search hard enough, you will eventually find your way to “Richie Rich.”Listen to this article, read by Ron ButlerYou know the one, from the old comic books. In Netflix’s series, he was reimagined as a self-made boy who discovered a novel source of energy derived from all the vegetables he never ate, making him the world’s first trillionaire. And now he lives in a mansion with an amusement park and a robot maid; his dad is an oaf and a layabout; his best friend, played by the future Netflix superstar Jenna Ortega, is a mooch; a rapper named Bulldozah lives next door, with a son who is also friends with Richie. In contrast to the dark, lonely and besieged version of Richie played by Macaulay Culkin in 1994, here Richie’s life is basically good, though not without the sort of headaches that arise from being a prepubescent trillionaire.In the fourth episode of the show, Richie struggles to write a book report on “The Wizard of Oz”: The book puts him to sleep, the movie puts him to sleep, he doesn’t know what to do. Bulldozah’s son suggests he remake the movie, and with no practical reason not to, he does. But as soon as he begins, things deteriorate. The Lion character has rewritten himself to be cool and have a motorcycle. Dorothy also wants to be cool; she thinks she should be from Paris, not Kansas, and wants to be named Véronique. His robot maid can’t accept that the Tin Woodsman would rust because he’s made of tin — she’s apparently right about this — so she decides she’s the Tungsten Carbide Woodsman. By the end, the movie is being shot in 3-D and there are time-traveling dinosaurs, an asteroid and evil space robots — a decision that offends Richie’s maid.“For once,” she says, “it would be really cool to see a positive role model for young robots.”“Did someone say ‘cool’?” says the Scarecrow, now dressed up as an ice cream cone. “You know what else is cool?” (He has secured a product-placement deal.)Rather unwittingly, the episode poses a question that haunts our age: What happens to entertainment when a newcomer, armed with an effectively endless amount of money, starts making it? What happens, in other words, when you become Netflix?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Industry’ Blends ‘Succession’ With ‘Grey’s Anatomy’

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      Set in the high-pressure world of investment banking, the series, now in Season 3, started out unremarkably but has since become appointment viewing.When “Industry,” a jargony drama about climbing the ladder in the investment banking industry, debuted back in 2020, it was clunky and too generic, and it often telegraphed its twists. But the show found its sea legs, and its slick second season was a ruthless, breathless treat — fast and good-mean. Each episode turned the temperature up and up and up, taking the conflict among our miserable bank bébés from a simmer to an aggressive boil.Then it cranked things even hotter, turning steam to plasma in its last moments — a wilder, more significant phase change.Season 3, which began on Sunday, picks up a few months into this shift. Harper (Myha’la) is licking her wounds after her ouster from the high-pressure London firm Pierpoint, but she has landed at FutureDawn, the female-led, ostensibly socially-conscious fund from Season 2. She is working as an assistant, well outside — and, in her eyes, well beneath — her biz-whiz skill set, but she has never been one to follow workplace rules. She aligns herself with an equally disgruntled senior portfolio manager, Petra (Sarah Goldberg, of “Barry” fame), and starts sharpening her knives.“Industry” can sometimes feel like “Succession Jr.” with its icy palate, its appetite for financial lingo, its characters’ soulless scheming and lines like “I haven’t done blow since 9/11” and “the only famous salesman is Willy Loman.” The incessant shouting, lies, secrecy and debt recall “The Bear,” and its snappy critiques of faux liberalism remind me of “Hacks.” (“I never watch [porn] … unless it’s directed by women,” brags one guy, on a private jet.)But the show it reminds me of most is still “Grey’s Anatomy”: “Industry” also begins on everyone’s first day, with our crew of newbies jockeying for top spots and hooking up with each other, enduring grueling hours and harsh — alluring — mentorship. The rookies’ ingenuity is sometimes valorized, but sometimes it is illegal, and sometimes super-duper illegal. Each character’s family of origin has some murky secret, and none of them are quite sure whether they should be ride-or-die loyal to one another or “all’s fair in work and war” competitors.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Kite Man’ Is a Fun, Irreverent ‘Harley Quinn’ Spinoff

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      Like “Harley,” the series is set among Gotham’s villains and goons, with a similarly lewd and rowdy vibe.“Harley Quinn” is one of the best comedies going these days, quick and filthy and ambitious. (It’s all on Max.) Perhaps predictably, it has earned itself a spinoff; perhaps unpredictably, that spinoff is pegged to one of its lesser characters. “Kite Man: Hell Yeah!,” premiering Thursday on Max, keeps the nervy lewdness and contemporary pop-psychology of “Harley” but redirects its energy to Kite Man (voiced by Matt Oberg).“Kite Man” operates as an ensemble show and might be more accurately titled “Kite Man and Golden Glider,” since Kite Man’s girlfriend has just as big a slice of the narrative pie. On “Harley,” the will-they-won’t-they of Harley and Poison Ivy drives a lot of the first few seasons. Here, Kite Man and Golden Glider (Stephanie Hsu) are together and thriving, in their warped and sometimes dopey ways, from the get go, and their conflicts stem largely from their decision to buy a decrepit bar. Well, that and the super villainy: The setting here, as with “Harley,” is among Gotham’s villains, goons, thugs and scoundrels and their various appetites for destruction.The show gets off to a bumpy start because Kite Man is mostly just an airhead with daddy issues, which the show says overtly and often. The real momentum of the season follows Golden Glider and her mommy issues — hers is the richer story because she is more biting and self aware. I do wish the show dropped all its episodes at once because it makes for such a zesty binge and because I wasn’t quite sold right out of the gate.Even bad guys have their bad guys, and on “Kite Man,” our pals are up against the ever-expanding Villigans corporation. “Villigans isn’t a chain restaurant/global e-commerce/privatized prison system; we’re really a data business,” boasts its leader (Judith Light) as she rattles off personal details and manipulates the gang.If the plot of “Kite Man” doesn’t always quite soar, the dialogue is a ton of fun. “I guess one slippery slope couldn’t hurt,” says a teetotaler looking at a cocktail menu. A new character, Dubelz (Michael Imperioli), a mobster with two heads (sort of …), advises Kite Man that Golden Glider is out of his league. “You’re dating a meatball bigger than your mouth,” he huffs. And all the silliness and non sequiturs mean dramatic lines land even harder. “My parents were doing their favorite thing in their favorite place: fighting in a bar,” Golden Glider laments.The best part of the show — and the best part of “Harley Quinn” — is Bane (James Adomian), and he gets more screen time as the season goes on. His shimmering insecurity and fealty to social rules make him a consistent fish out of water, too rigid for both the evildoers and the regular joes of the world. He gets roped into balloon-animal duty at a child’s birthday party and hands them a mangled snarl. “It is despair!” he announces, proudly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Smiling Friends’ Is a Deranged Blast

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      This warped Adult Swim animated series, streaming on Max, is so fast and feral it feels like its own highlight reel.Charlie, Pip and Allan try to make people smile at Smiling Friends Inc.Adult SwimThe setup for the Adult Swim series “Smiling Friends,” available on Max, sounds like the premise of a cheery, do-unto-others children’s show: Charlie and Pim (voiced by Zach Hadel and Michael Cusack, the show’s creators) and their kooky pals work at Smiling Friends Inc., where their job is to make clients smile.But there is nary a shred of cutesy wholesomeness here — instead, there is cursing, bloodshed, absurdity, silliness. The show is so fast and feral it feels like its own highlight reel.Each 12-minute installment takes us on another deranged misadventure, to odd enclaves and foreign planets, to find lost loves, influence political elections, revamp video-game franchises. “Smiling Friends” has an omnivorous sensibility, and its punchlines can be surreal and warped or grounded and tenderly specific, all part of its grand ethnography of weird little freaks. It also varies its animation style, with Charlie and Pim looking mostly unchanged but guest characters depicted in a range of formats: live action, grotesque illustration, rotoscoped realism.If some of this character design conjures fond associations with “Tom Goes to the Mayor” or “Beavis and Butt-Head,” well, that’s how you know you are in the right place. “Smiling” is more acrid than “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” and plays by different rules than “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” but it has a similar naughtiness.The show first aired as a backdoor pilot in 2020, was ordered to series in 2021, debuted in 2022 and is about to finish its second season on Sunday at midnight on Adult Swim. (It was recently renewed for a third season.) Part of the appeal here is the show’s wide curiosity and unpredictable rhythm; its grab-bagginess recreates the lure of a blind-box toy. There’s also a snacky quality to “Smiling,” thanks to the peppy vulgarity that is basically Adult Swim’s Doritos powder.Its episodic nature and short running times help, too — though as with any modern show that wants to be loved, Easter eggs and deep-cut callbacks abound. More

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      HBO Could Use a Hit and ‘House of the Dragon’ Could be the Answer

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      The network has hit an unusually fallow period. Executives hope “House of the Dragon,” which returns Sunday, could be the start of a new winning streak.The dragons are back. And not a moment too soon.On Sunday, “House of the Dragon,” the “Game of Thrones” prequel series, will return to HBO for its second season. The show became a bona fide hit in its first season, in 2022, and helped kick off a torrid winning streak for the network that included the beloved sophomore season of “The White Lotus”; the premiere of a new hit, “The Last of Us”; and the decorated final season of “Succession.”But over the past year, HBO has encountered a fallow stretch — unusual for America’s pre-eminent premium television network.There have been disappointments (the music drama “The Idol” and the Kate Winslet-starring limited series “The Regime,” for instance), and delayed premieres because of the double Hollywood strikes last year. According to one widely used industry metric, Max, the 13-month-old streaming service that houses HBO’s shows, has plateaued during that time. One high-ranking executive at Warner Bros. Discovery, HBO’s parent company, chalked up Max’s slow start to “probably the lightest content slate we’ve ever had.”HBO’s one-year slowdown could be underscored when Emmy nominations arrive next month, usually a cause for celebration for the network. But in contrast to previous years, shows from HBO and Max will not be favorites in some of the major categories, including drama, a category that HBO dominated at the most recent Emmys.According to some award forecasters, HBO could finish third among networks in total nominations, which would be its lowest ranking since 1996. HBO executives acknowledged that they were anticipating reduced award recognition this year. But they said they were looking to the months ahead, starting with this weekend.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More