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    ¡Vámonos! Dora Is Back for a New Round of Exploring

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    Boots, Map, Swiper and Backpack all return too, in a new “Dora” that includes a lot more Latin music and Spanish language.Barbie isn’t the only childhood heroine experiencing a renaissance. Yet unlike the doll of last year’s blockbuster movie, the next pop-culture star who’s about to re-emerge isn’t a statuesque blonde in stiletto heels. She’s a pint-size Latina with sturdy sneakers and a trusty backpack.Welcome back, Dora.Nickelodeon, the network that in 2000 introduced “Dora the Explorer,” the groundbreaking bilingual animated show about the adventures of a 7-year-old Hispanic girl, is now rebooting that hit series, which over eight seasons aired in more than 150 countries, winning multiple awards and inspiring two TV spinoffs and a feature-length film.The new show’s catalyst “wasn’t necessarily that the first series was over,” Valerie Walsh Valdes, a creator and executive producer of “Dora,” said in a video interview. (“Dora the Explorer” continues to stream on various outlets, including YouTube.) “It was, ‘OK, how are we extending it, how are we going to grow her? And what’s the next iteration?’”On Friday, Paramount+ will release a full season of 26 streaming episodes of the new show, which is titled simply “Dora” and which will also air internationally on the Nick Jr. channel. (Select episodes will be on YouTube as well.) An accompanying podcast, “Dora’s Recipe for Adventure,” will expand the little girl’s exploits into the culinary sphere.The 2024 “Dora” combines old and new. The series retains all the core characters — Dora; her sidekick, the monkey Boots; her talking tools, Backpack and Map; and her antagonist, the thieving fox Swiper — while featuring them for the first time in computer-generated animation. The show still focuses on expeditions that teach problem-solving strategies and social skills, but Map now has some high-tech capabilities. Dora and Boots continue to embark on missions to find lost objects or aid friends in a magical rainforest, but the quests are faster-paced: Each “Dora” episode is now an 11-minute story. And, significantly, the series will incorporate a greater breadth of Latin music and more Spanish language for Dora.Ten-year-old Diana Zermeño voices Dora in the new show, while Kathleen Herles, who played her in the original “Dora the Explorer” series, has returned to voice Dora’s mother.Paramount+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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      Ewan McGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead Check In to ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’

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      The first time that Ewan McGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead shot a scene together, they were in a bathtub, mostly naked. McGregor, in a maximally unflattering wig, was sticking his gut out as far as it would go.“You were just trying to be as grotesque as you could be,” Winstead said affectionately.This was on a recent afternoon in the chilly basement of a midtown hotel where McGregor and Winstead perched on a love seat, his jacket over his shoulders, his hand on her knee. They met in 2017, on the set of the third season of “Fargo,” co-starring as Ray Stussy, a hapless parole officer, and Nikki Swango, his grifter sweetheart. (McGregor also played Emmit Stussy, Ray’s twin.) Two years later, in 2019, they filmed “Birds of Prey” but did not share scenes. They are also both participants in the “Star Wars” franchise — McGregor in the ’90s and ’00s films and the more recent “Obi-Wan Kenobi” series, Winstead in “Ahsoka” — though again they did not share scenes. In 2021, Winstead gave birth to their son. The next year, they married.Now, they have reunited onscreen for “A Gentleman in Moscow,” which premiered Friday on Paramount+ and debuts Sunday on Showtime. An adaptation of Amor Towles’s novel, it stars McGregor as Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, a mustached aristocrat sentenced to house arrest in a luxury hotel in the years following the Russian Revolution. Winstead appears as Anna Urbanova, an actress and the count’s sometimes girlfriend. Somehow, in the confines of the hotel, they make a life.McGregor plays a Russian count imprisoned in a luxury hotel and Winstead an actress who becomes his companion.Ben Blackall/Paramount+ with ShowtimeIn an hourlong conversation, in a hotel somewhat more modest than Moscow’s Metropol, they discussed claustrophobia, facial hair and the benefits and detriments of working with a spouse. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did you get involved with “A Gentleman in Moscow”?EWAN MCGREGOR It came to me first. I loved the grand nature of the drama, the love and loss and romance. I feel like it’s rarer and rarer to get a chance to play that stuff. At the heart of it, it’s about a man who’s learning to be a husband and learning to be a dad and crawling out of his ideas of the aristocratic way of life to find who he really is.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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      ‘As We Speak’: Rap Music on Trial’ Review: Weaponizing Lyrics in Court

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      Lyrics that contain references to violence have been used as legal evidence, a practice this documentary by J.M. Harper condemns as unfair and prejudicial.Imagine music that you wrote being held against you in a criminal proceeding. In the documentary “As We Speak: Rap Music on Trial,” the Bronx-born rapper Kemba travels around the country and to Britain, interviewing artists and legal experts about how that has been more than a theoretical possibility for rappers.Mac Phipps, for instance, was convicted of manslaughter and spent more than two decades in prison, even though another man had confessed to the crime. (He was released in 2021.) In an interview with Kemba, he describes how references to violence in his lyrics were used at his trial, despite what he suggests was inadequate context. (One line cited concerned his father, a Vietnam veteran.)Elsewhere in this documentary, directed by J.M. Harper, the academic Adam Dunbar explains a set of studies he conducted. Participants were asked to judge lyrics from the same song: Some were told they were rap lyrics, others were told they were country and still others were told they were heavy metal. The group that believed the words were rap lyrics labeled the songwriter as having a greater criminal propensity. When the artist manager Chace Infinite argues that rap is taken more literally than other music, the movie cuts to clips of Johnny Cash and Freddie Mercury. Would a jury have accorded legal weight to Cash’s claim, in song, to have “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”?Kemba situates the association of rap with crime in a historical context of censorship of Black music. In another thread, “As We Speak” imagines Kemba himself on trial, with his writing being used against him in a criminal court. The staged material is a bit heavy-handed, but “As We Speak” makes a powerful case for the necessity of being free to make art, and for public awareness that art rarely qualifies as legal evidence.As We Speak: Rap Music on TrialNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      Ruth Wilson on the True Horrors of ‘The Woman in the Wall’

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      Her fictional character lives in an unstable reality and may have killed someone. But the history of Ireland’s notorious “Magdalene laundries” is all too real.Ruth Wilson has ducked into a cabin in the French Alps, taking a break from an activity she enjoys when she isn’t acting. “I’ve been skiing this week,” she said last week in a video interview. “It’s been a passion for years. It’s very dangerous. I can go head-down into something.”She said that last part with a smile. Wilson, an English actress known for playing Idris Elba’s psychopathic nemesis in “Luther,” likes going to extremes and working without a net. Last year, at the Young Vic theater in London, she tested her endurance in “The Second Woman,” a 24-hour production in which her character goes through the same breakup scene 100 times, with 100 different scene partners. (Some, like Elba and Toby Jones, were trained actors; most were not.) For her first professional Shakespeare assignment, a 2019 Broadway production of “King Lear,” she played both Cordelia and the king’s Fool (opposite Glenda Jackson’s Lear).Wilson’s latest role, in the limited series “The Woman in the Wall,” is no less daunting. (It premieres on Friday on Paramount+ With Showtime, having debuted in Britain in August.) She plays Lorna, a woman haunted by her years at one of Ireland’s “Magdalene laundries,” at least a dozen of which operated across the country from the 19th century until the last one closed in 1996. Run by Catholic nuns, the mostly for-profit laundries used unmarried, pregnant and otherwise ostracized women for hard, unpaid labor, often after mothers were forcibly separated from their children.Lorna, who is packed off to a fictional laundry at age 15, wants desperately to find her daughter. Like many babies born to unwed Irish mothers like Lorna, she was sold into adoption against her mother’s will. Hundreds of others are buried in unmarked graves.“We’re trying to land on what it must feel like for some of these women from the laundries, for this constant trauma to be coming back,” Wilson (with Frances Tomelty) said.Chris Barr/BBC with Paramount+ and ShowtimeAs the series begins, Lorna, a chronic sleepwalker and outcast, is startled to find a dead body in her home. This happens around the same time a popular priest is found murdered. The six-episode series leans into Lorna’s tortured perception and subjective experience; she is antisocial and unstable but also the target of gaslighting by those in her seaside Irish town who insist that nothing all that bad happened to her when she was young.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?  More

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      ‘June’ Review: More Than Johnny Cash’s Wife

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      A new documentary by Kristen Vaurio details the life and career of the singer-songwriter, who was a member of country music royalty.The singer June Carter Cash was born in 1929 into the Carter Family, an influential early country music group, and toured with Elvis Presley in the 1950s. She married Johnny Cash in 1968 and became part of his touring show. She also wrote, with Merle Kilgore, of one of Cash’s greatest hits, “Ring of Fire.”Despite her contributions to music, her solo endeavor in 1999, “Press On,” elicited little interest from the major labels, but the album went on to win a Grammy regardless. Archival footage of its making anchors the new documentary “June,” directed by Kristen Vaurio.The phrase that gave that album its title, “Press On,” is a neat encapsulation of June’s life philosophy. Her love story with Cash, and her perseverance as he battled addictions, is one of the most renowned in the annals of 20th-century celebrity.“I thank God for people like her who still thought I had a little good in me,” Cash said in an archival interview. And John Carter Cash, the sole child of June and Johnny, says of the love his parents shared: “To get a window on that strength and beauty we have but to listen” to their music.The critic Robert Christgau once characterized Carter Cash, who died in 2003, as “that rare thing, an interesting saint: fiery, feisty, creative, proactive.” Contemporary interviews here with the likes of Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Carter Cash’s stepdaughter Rosanne Cash and Carter Cash’s daughter Carlene Carter, expand on her gifts, both musical and maternal.The bare facts of Carter Cash’s story are such that the filmmakers would have had to really mess up to not produce a movie that entertains and moves a viewer to tears. “June,” rest assured, does the job well.JuneNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      ‘The Curse’ Ending: What Just Happened?

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      The season finale of Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s horror-comedy arrived on Friday. Three New York Times critics discuss the show’s curses, blessings and confounding conclusion.On Friday, the first season of “The Curse,” Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s cringe horror-comedy on Showtime and Paramount+, came to an audaciously unpredictable end. Three New York Times critics — James Poniewozik, chief TV critic; Alissa Wilkinson, movie critic; and Jason Zinoman, critic at large — discussed the confounding conclusion, the show’s religious themes and the sublime inscrutability of Emma Stone’s performance.JAMES PONIEWOZIK Greetings, “Curse”-heads! We have seen the finale, and I can now confidently say: lol wut?Ten uncomfortable, ingenious episodes ended with one of the biggest literal and figurative upendings in TV history (spoilers ahead). Asher Siegel (Nathan Fielder) has his personal field of gravity reversed like a horror-comedy Fred Astaire, hurtling off the Earth to an apparent frozen death in orbit, while his wife, Whitney (Emma Stone), goes into labor and gives birth to their child. All this, and Vincent Pastore cooks meatballs!I haven’t seen an episode of TV this audacious, confounding and transfixing since “Twin Peaks: The Return.” I haven’t seen a series so thoroughly and unexpectedly shift direction in its finale since … ever?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?  More

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      Best Movies and TV Shows Streaming in January: ‘Echo,’ ‘True Detective’ and More

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      We’ve rounded up of the titles most worth checking out in the coming month, including an adaptation of “The Expatriates” and the return of “True Detective.”Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of January’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘Expats’Starts streaming: Jan. 26Based on Janice Y.K. Lee’s best-selling novel “The Expatriates,” this low-key melodrama is set in Hong Kong, where three very different Americans find their lives intertwining. Nicole Kidman plays Margaret, a socialite and mother whose seemingly idyllic world has been recently marred by tragedy. Sarayu Blue is Hilary, Margaret’s once-close friend, who has drifted away as her own domestic situation has soured. And Ji-young Yoo is Mercy, a younger working woman who takes jobs that put her in the orbit of the rich. The indie filmmaker Lulu Wang (best-known for “The Farewell”) serves as a writer, director and creative supervisor for the miniseries, which is about women enduring crises big and small while trying to make homes for themselves in a foreign land.Also arriving:Jan. 5“Foe”“James May: Our Man in India”Jan. 12“Role Play”“Uninterrupted’s Top Class: The Life and Times of the Sierra Canyon Trailblazers”Jan. 19“Dance Life” Season 1“Hazbin Hotel” Season 1Jan. 23“Kevin James: Irregardless”New to AMC+Clive Owen brings the classic Dashiell Hammett character Sam Spade to the South of France in “Monsieur Spade.”Jean-Claude Lother/AMC‘Monsieur Spade’Starts streaming: Jan. 14The writer-director-producer Scott Frank follows up his hit drama “The Queen’s Gambit” with this offbeat mystery series, created and written with Tom Fontana, the creator of “Oz.” Clive Owen plays Dashiell Hammett’s famed detective Sam Spade, who in the show’s first episode moves to a sleepy village in the South of France in the early 1960s and settles into semiretirement. But Spade’s neighborly interest in the locals’ lives eventually gets him back into the snooping business — especially after a horrific crime at a nearby convent outrages the community. Frank and Fontana are aiming for a soft-boiled Euro-noir vibe with “Monsieur Spade,” staging this story of murder and regret against a backdrop of vineyards and villas.Also arriving:Jan. 4“Sanctuary: A Witch’s Tale”Jan. 8“Cheat”Jan. 12“Destroy All Neighbors”Jan. 15“Alex Rider” Seasons 1 & 2Jan. 22“The Guff” Seasons 1 & 2Jan. 26“Suitable Flesh”Jan. 29“Crossroads” Season 2“No Offense” Seasons 1-3New to Apple TV+‘Criminal Record’ Season 1Starts streaming: Jan. 10The British writer-producer Paul Rutman (creator of the historical drama “Indian Summers” and a writer for the cop show “Vera”) continues his fascination with brutal crime and social divisions in his new series “Criminal Record,” a modern murder mystery in which the perception of the evidence differs depending on who is doing the examining. Cush Jumbo plays Detective Sergeant June Lenker, who while following up on a phoned-in tip becomes convinced that one of her superiors — Detective Chief Inspector Daniel Hegarty (Peter Capaldi) — intentionally nabbed the wrong man in an old case. Lenker’s drive to see justice done sets her against the London police force’s old guard, who suggest that as a Black woman with less experience, she may be looking for bias where none exists.‘Masters of the Air’Starts streaming: Jan. 26A companion piece to the popular, award-winning World War II dramas “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific,” this miniseries covers the men of the 100th Bomb Group, who suffered heavy casualties while running crucial missions deep into Nazi territory. Austin Butler stars as a handsome officer who heads overseas with visions of glory and soon finds that the realities of combat are more challenging and devastating than he could have imagined. As with the earlier series, this new one (produced again by Gary Goetzman, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg) is an ensemble piece, showing how camaraderie helps fighting men endure. “Masters of Air” also features an all-star team of directors drawn from the acclaimed indie film and prestige TV ranks, including Cary Joji Fukunaga, Dee Rees, Tim Van Patten and the duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.New to Disney+Alaqua Cox in the new Marvel series “Echo,” a spinoff of the series “Hawkeye.”Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel Studios, via Disney+‘Echo’Starts streaming: Jan. 9The television arm of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is going through changes, moving away from having every movie and TV series connect closely to a larger transmedia narrative. Although “Echo” is a spinoff from the Avengers-adjacent miniseries “Hawkeye” — with Alaqua Cox reprising her role as a deaf Native American with the power to mimic other people’s fighting styles — and although it will feature the Marvel villain Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio), the show is meant to stand alone, appealing even to viewers who have never even heard of the likes of Daredevil or She-Hulk. “Echo” will be available on both Hulu and Disney+. It is the first TV-MA Marvel series, reflecting its more mature story, about a woman who has to reckon with her past in Oklahoma in order to get some killers off her trail.‘Bluey’ Season 3, Part 3Starts streaming: Jan. 12It’s a major event whenever Disney+ imports any new “Bluey” episodes from Australia, where the series airs months before it hits the United States. This latest batch of 10 includes episodes in which the imaginative puppy Bluey and her sweet kid sister, Bingo, build an elaborate furniture fort, take a trip to the beach, pretend to be office workers, play a game with a store’s security monitors and more. Will America’s parents and children be patient enough to parcel out these seven-minute doses of joy over multiple days, or will they burn through them all in one night?Also arriving:Jan. 17“Siempre Fui Yo” Season 2Jan. 24“A Real Bug’s Life”Jan. 31“Choir”New to Hulu‘Death and Other Details’Starts streaming: Jan. 16The “Knives Out”/“Only Murders in the Building” trend toward colorful whodunits continues with this stylish mystery series, set mostly on a high-end cruise ship in the Mediterranean. Violett Beane plays Imogene Scott, a young woman with a tragic past, who ends up becoming the prime suspect in a tricky locked-room murder case. Mandy Patinkin plays Rufus Coteworth, a celebrity detective who 20 years earlier disappointed the adolescent Imogene with his inability to bring her mother’s killer to justice. Reluctantly, she puts her remarkable memory together with Rufus’s keen eye for detail, working with him to find out which of the wealthy, fabulously well-dressed people on a luxury liner may have harpoon-gunned a man to death.Also arriving:Jan. 3“Ishura”Jan. 4“Daughters of the Cult”Jan. 7“The Incredible Pol Farm”Jan. 9“Beyond Utopia”“Safe Home” Season 1Jan. 12“Miranda’s Victim”“Self Reliance”Jan. 17“A Shop for Killers”Jan. 18“Invisible Beauty”Jan. 22“Superhot: The Spicy World of Pepper People” Season 1Jan. 24“Tell Me That You Love Me” Season 1Jan. 28“R.M.N.”New to Max‘True Detective’ Season 4Starts streaming: Jan. 14The latest edition of the HBO crime anthology “True Detective: (now subtitled “Night Country”) has a new show runner in Issa López, who continues the series’s tradition of attracting big-time movie stars to do television. Jodie Foster plays Liz Danvers, an Alaskan police detective whose contentious relationship with her colleague Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) complicates their investigation into two strange, possibly intertwined cases: the murder of an Indigenous social activist and the disappearance of eight scientists from an Arctic Research Station. The stellar cast includes John Hawkes as Danvers’s slack underling, Christopher Eccleston as their fussy boss and Fiona Shaw as a local with a strange spiritual connection to this dark, desolate, wintry landscape.Also arriving:Jan. 8“Going to Mars: The Nicki Giovanni Project”Jan. 18“On the Roam”“Sort Of” Season 3Jan. 22“Rick and Morty” Season 7New to Paramount+ With Showtime‘Sexy Beast’Starts streaming: Jan. 25The arty 2000 gangster movie “Sexy Beast” became a favorite among both cinephiles and crime story aficionados for its darkly comic story of aging British crooks. This prequel TV series is set in the ’90s and catches these men and women in their heyday, when they ruled London’s underworld but also as they began heading in the directions that would later pull them apart. James McArdle plays Gal Dove, a sharp-witted hustler whose attraction to the adult film actress Deedee Harrison (Sarah Greene) gets him to start thinking about a life away from his overly intense partner Don Logan (Emun Elliott) and their boss Teddy Bass (Stephen Moyer).Also arriving:Jan. 11“SkyMed” Season 2Jan. 16“June”Jan. 19“The Woman in the Wall”New to PeacockThe title bear of the prequel series “Ted,” as voiced by Seth MacFarlane.Peacock‘Ted’ Season 1Starts streaming: Jan. 11This prequel to the writer-director Seth MacFarlane’s hit movies “Ted” and “Ted 2” jumps back to 1993, following the early misadventures of the Boston-area teenager John Bennett (Max Burkholder) and his walking, talking, swearing teddy bear (voiced by MacFarlane). As Ted joins his best buddy, Johnny, in high school, the series riffs on the old John Hughes teen misfit movies and weird family TV shows like “Alf,” in which one kid’s journey through the usual coming-of-age rituals is complicated by his unconventional domestic situation. As with the “Ted” films, MacFarlane gets laughs from the matter-of-fact way that full-sized humans interact with a small, adorable, unapologetically vulgar stuffed animal.Also arriving:Jan. 12“The Traitors” Season 2Jan. 25“In the Know” Season 1 More

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      What Your Favorite Streaming Services Will Cost You in 2024

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      Amazon will start showing ads to some Prime Video subscribers who pay less. They’re not alone.If you were planning on watching the final season of “Jack Ryan” or eight seasons of “House” without commercials on Amazon Prime next year, get ready to dig a little deeper into your pockets.In September, Amazon announced it would soon add advertisements to Prime Video, its streaming service, and this week announced when that change would go into effect: Jan 29. Customers wanting to avoid the ads would have to pay an extra $2.99 a month.Less than a decade ago, the streaming era took off on the promise of letting users cut the cord from expensive cable bills and enjoy a blissful ad-free viewing experience. But as we enter 2024, Amazon isn’t the only service bringing back ads or driving prices higher.Studios and streaming companies that make all this entertainment say they are struggling, and that it’s getting increasingly hard to attract new customers. The result is higher prices, or plans that are cheaper but include ads.There are also other measures. This fall, Netflix announced a price hike and said it would start clamping down on users who share their passwords with people outside of their households for free.To help you make a choice for the new year, here’s what some of the main streaming services will cost and what they will offer. (All prices are in U.S. dollars and apply to U.S. accounts.)Amazon Prime VideoAmazon executives have said that including the video service helped keep people subscribed to its Prime memberships, which include free shipping.In 2022, the company completed its purchase of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer — and, crucially, its extensive catalog of movies and television shows, including titles like James Bond, which is available on Prime Video.The current price for an Amazon Prime membership is $14.99 a month (or $139 per year). Prime Video by itself is $8.99 a month. For ad-free viewing, Amazon will add $2.99 per month to your bill starting Jan. 29. And careful: If you opt into a free trial, Amazon will automatically start charging you after it ends.John Turturro in “Severance” on Apple TV+.Wilson Webb/Apple TV+, via Associated PressApple TV+In 2019, Apple announced that it would start creating its own television shows and movies at an extremely star-studded event in California. The streaming service offers Apple originals — “Severance” and “Ted Lasso” — and a subscription can be shared with up to five people. There are no ads.A monthly subscription for the streaming service costs $9.99. Apple also offers three free months when you buy one of their devices.Disney+For $7.99 a month, subscribers get content with ads. For $13.99 a month (or $139.99 a year) you can stream Disney+ without ads and download content for when you’re offline.Its offerings include Pixar and Disney movies as well as “Star Wars” and Marvel movies and TV shows, 34 seasons of “The Simpsons” and about 7,500 episodes of old Disney-branded shows.MaxWarner Bros. Discovery unveiled this combined streaming service in April, rebranding the former HBO Max. An ad-free experience will cost you $15.99 a month. An “Ultimate ad-free” version for $19.99 allows users to add more devices to the account as well as up to 100 downloads. For a $9.99 add-on per month, you can also watch live sports.Max offers the “Harry Potter” movies, classic HBO shows such as “The Wire,” “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City,” as well as newer releases, such as “Barbie.” The streamer has also ordered a “Harry Potter” TV series.HuluFor $17.99 a month you can watch Hulu’s vast catalog — titles include “New Girl,” “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and “Fargo” — without ads. If you’re willing to sit through commercials, it’s $7.99 a month.Hulu also offers the option of adding live television to your plan, as well as content from other streaming services such as Disney+ and ESPN+, although the latter does come with ads. Those options range from $75.99 to $89.99 a month.If you want to watch Lauren Graham, left, and Alexis Bledel in “Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life,” that’ll be at least $6.99 a month on Netflix.Saeed Adyani/NetflixNetflixRaise your hand if you remember getting DVDs from Netflix in the mail in the early 2000s. In 2010, Netflix started selling its streaming service for $8 a month and offering one DVD at a time for an additional $2.Netflix now offers a $6.99 per month subscription, which is ad-supported, which the company says “allows you to enjoy movies and TV shows at a lower price.” A standard plan (without ads) is $15.49 a month. For access to more devices, the cost goes up to $22.99 a month. Adding additional people that aren’t included in your subscription will cost you an additional $7.99 per person per month. Netflix mailed its last DVD in September.Among its offerings: “Gilmore Girls,” “La La Land,” and international series such as “Squid Game.”Paramount+In 2021, CBS rebranded its streaming platform, which it heralded as “a big day, a new day, a new beginning.” That announcement came with promises of a “Frasier” reboot and a revival of the animated series “Rugrats.”A lot of other Paramount content can be found elsewhere. The company sold the rights to the “South Park” library to HBO Max, and series like “Jack Ryan,” produced by Paramount, have gone to Amazon.Paramount+ Essential will cost you $5.99 a month (or $59.99 a year) and includes “limited commercial interruptions.” The service also offers a bundle together with SHOWTIME in a plan that costs $11.99 a month (or $119.99 a year).PeacockThe premium subscription for NBC Universal’s streaming service will cost you $5.99 a month and includes original content, films, live sporting events and more. A Premium Plus subscription is priced at $11.99 a month and offers — mostly — no ads as well as the ability to download content.Some of the programs you can watch include “Parks and Recreation,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” “Downton Abbey,” and “Everybody Loves Raymond,” as well as Bravo content like the “Real Housewives” franchise. More

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      ‘Lawmen: Bass Reeves’ Review: A Frontier Injustice

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      David Oyelowo gives an unimpeachable performance, but Taylor Sheridan still hasn’t met a western that he can’t turn into an overheated melodrama.What we know, or have decided to accept, about the life of the deputy U.S. marshal Bass Reeves has more of the flavor of carnival legend than of scholarship. The Paramount+ series “Lawmen: Bass Reeves,” which concluded on Sunday, was based not on history books or biographies but on novels. The most prominent telling of his story so far was a dramatization of a dramatization.That kind of haziness leaves room for invention, and the tales that have settled around Reeves — a former slave credited with 3,000 arrests; a crack shot said to have killed 14 men in the line of duty — could be the basis for a new take on classic western action and adventure. The tales also suggest that the career Reeves carved out for himself, and the extreme success he found, would at least occasionally have caused him some excitement and joy. That is not where “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” ended up.David Oyelowo gave an unimpeachable performance as Reeves, focused and intense and emotionally true. And the show’s creator, Chad Feehan, and his directors, Christina Alexandra Voros and Damian Marcano, put onscreen a notably handsome and visually credible evocation of the American West in the 1870s. The show had texture — it gave a tactile pleasure throughout its eight episodes.But as it went along, it became less of a treat to watch and more of a chore. Its story of heroism against all odds had gun battles and frontier romance, but we were almost never allowed to simply enjoy them. And poor David Oyelowo appeared to be having less fun than anyone.It was to the show’s credit that it didn’t try to make Reeves a six-gun superman — he operated with guile and caution, letting other people’s carelessness and hotheadedness work for him, and he grimaced and cowered when under fire. But the show’s one-note insistence on his beleaguered nobility, even as his composure faded and his trigger finger got too itchy, was so continual and unmodulated that it flattened the character and drained the story of humor.Reeves’s arc in the early episodes, as he emerged from slavery, tried his hand at farming and then was recruited into the marshals’ service by a sympathetic judge (played by Donald Sutherland), had an urgent, realistic snap to it. But once he put on the badge, the show slowed and got down to its real business, which wasn’t dramatizing the exploits of an exceptional lawman under grueling circumstances.Lauren E. Banks as Jennie Reeves and Demi Singleton as her daughter Sally. The best moments in “Lawmen” were its domestic scenes.Emerson Miller/Paramount+The latter half of the season was, instead, about putting Reeves through a crisis of conscience over his enforcement of laws enacted and administered by the same white men who had once enslaved him. (The more interesting choice dramatically, and probably the one better supported by the historical record, would have been for him not to care.) And having established its seriousness, the show went big, inventing as its embodiment of racist evil an ex-Confederate Texas Ranger (played by Barry Pepper) who used Black prisoners as slave labor and, just to drive home his odiousness, quoted French Enlightenment drama.That “Lawmen” would undergo a mytho-melodramatic implosion is perhaps not surprising. It is in the purview of the executive producer Taylor Sheridan, who has shown a bent for gaseous mythologizing in westerns like “Yellowstone” and “1883.” And Feehan has a history with shows that privileged macho poetics over straightforward action, like “Ray Donovan,” “Banshee” and “Rectify.”The best moments in “Lawmen” were its domestic scenes, which ran in counterpoint to the alternately depressive and histrionic story of Reeves’s work. Reeves’s wife, Jennie, and his oldest daughter, Sally, who kept the farm running in his absence, were played with warmth and great feeling by Lauren E. Banks and Demi Singleton; as impressive as Oyelowo was, it was always a relief when the action shifted to the farm.And racism and racial oppression in the post-Reconstruction era were treated more cogently and dramatically in those scenes as well. The awakening of the pragmatic Jennie to the larger issues championed by her sister Esme (Joaquina Kalukango) was subtle and touching; by contrast, the closing scene of Reeves leading a column of Black prisoners to freedom bordered on camp.Sheridan’s track record as a producer has ticked up lately, with “Tulsa King” and “Special Ops: Lioness” and even the early episodes of “Lawmen.” But when he makes westerns, modern or historical, he always seems to be caught between two conflicting impulses. One is to make anti-westerns like those of the 1960s and ’70s, in which the clichés of the genre are exposed and debunked; the other is to make deluxe versions of the classically sentimental western, in which those same clichés are renewed and celebrated. There’s another choice, of course, which would be just to make a good western. More