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    Best Thanksgiving Episodes to Stream: ‘Friends,’ ‘Succession’ and More

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    Thanksgiving episodes are an underrated TV staple. Here are some of the best to enjoy while you cook, eat or fade away on the couch.Note: This is an updated version of a list that originally ran in 2017.Preparing for the big binge? Whether you call the upcoming holiday Friendsgiving, Slapsgiving, the Feast of Feasts — or just, you know, Thanksgiving — this year, you can be thankful that there is plenty of TV to keep you company. Join these fictional families and friend groups while they break bread or break each other’s spirits, depending on which feels more comforting as you cook, eat and fade away on the couch. Yes, you may have seconds.‘Friends’Matthew Perry, who died last month, at 54, was the king of many a “Friends” Thanksgiving episode. Or as his character Chandler put it, the king of bad Thanksgivings. Or, as Monica’s mother put it, the Boy Who Hates Thanksgiving. (His disdain for the holiday stemmed from learning about his parents’ divorce one Thanksgiving as a child and vomiting in response.) Gradually, though, Chandler conquered his aversion, bailing out the gang with cheese sandwiches at the first Friendsgiving and later helping to prepare a batch of cranberry sauce (made, in his parlance, of tasty Chanberries). Fans with only enough room for one episode should seek out “The One With the Thanksgiving Flashbacks,” from Season 5. (Streaming on Max.)‘Rick and Morty’For the mad scientist Rick Sanchez (Justin Roiland), Thanksgiving is an ideal time to break into the National Archives and try to steal the Constitution. So what if some other national treasures are destroyed in the process? “Rick and Morty’s Thanksploitation Spectacular,” from Season 5, finds Rick on the outs with federal authorities and fomenting an elaborate scheme to score a presidential pardon. Pretty soon people start turning into turkeys while turkeys turn into humans. Your job, if you choose to accept this episode, is to make sense of all the gobbledygook. (Streaming on Max.)Lena Waithe won an Emmy for writing a “Master of None” Thanksgiving episode that tracked her character’s efforts to come out to her mother.Netflix‘Master of None’This series’s Thanksgiving episode is one of its very best. Shifting the focus from our indecisive hero, Dev (Aziz Ansari), to his lifelong friend Denise (Lena Waithe), it presents a sequence of vignettes following her through two decades of Thanksgiving dinners as she struggles to come out to her mother as a lesbian. Every element of this touching half-hour feels carefully crafted, from Angela Bassett’s emotional guest performance as Denise’s mother to the nostalgic 1990s R&B soundtrack. Waithe won an Emmy for the script — which was inspired by her own family history — becoming the first Black woman to win the award for writing in a comedy. (Streaming on Netflix.)‘Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’For mere mortals, Thanksgiving is a harvest festival. For witches, however, the equivalent Feast of Feasts is a very different celebration, with a very different main course — human rather than avian. In “Feast of Feasts,” from Season 1, the young witch Sabrina Spellman (Kiernan Shipka) is shocked to learn about this barbaric holiday ritual. (“Are we seriously taking about cannibalism?” she asks in horror.) Her rejection of this ancient tradition puts a damper on any festive feelings. (Streaming on Netflix.)‘Bob’s Burgers’A Season 3 episode is titled “An Indecent Thanksgiving Proposal,” but don’t worry — Bob and Linda Belcher’s marriage is safe. The proposal in question comes from the rich landlord, Mr. Fischoeder, who offers the Belchers five months’ free rent for a chaste evening with Linda and the family’s three children, with Bob on hand to cook. Like other schemes on the show, this one is a disaster. But Studio Ghibli fans should look out for a lovely dream sequence that pays tribute to “My Neighbor Totoro.” (Streaming on Hulu.)‘The Sopranos’Most of the episodes on this list are somewhat uplifting and work well as stand-alones. This one, titled “He Is Risen,” won’t make sense if you’ve never seen “The Sopranos,” and it is no more uplifting than any other hour of the show. But if you’re already a Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) fan, you probably don’t mind a dark holiday tale. This Season 3 episode features a car wreck, a funeral and the beginning of an extramarital relationship, along with a Soprano family Thanksgiving dinner that is surprisingly pleasant, thanks to the conspicuous absence of Tony’s most reprehensible associate, Ralph Cifaretto (Joe Pantoliano). (Streaming on Max.)James Cromwell, left, and Brian Cox in a Thanksgiving episode of “Succession,” which offered extra helpings of recrimination.Peter Kramer/HBO‘Succession’The Roys serve up the usual feast of familial animosity at their Thanksgiving bash. The patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) is especially disruptive, culminating with his lashing out at an innocent child. In “I Went to Market,” from Season 1, party chat includes touchy but relatable topics such as political ideologies and movie selections, but business concerns naturally trump everything. Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) has to skip most of the festivities — it seems there are some sensitive documents at the office in need of shredding. (Streaming on Max.)‘black-ish’It’s always fun to watch Laurence Fishburne and Jenifer Lewis on “black-ish,” picking at each other as the divorced grandparents Pops and Ruby. The Season 3 Thanksgiving episode, “Auntsgiving,” threw a third veteran actor into the fray, casting Lorraine Toussaint (“Orange Is the New Black”) as Pops’s older sister, Aunt A.V. — whom Ruby hates. (Streaming on Hulu.)‘Gilmore Girls’Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) and her teenage daughter, Rory (Alexis Bledel), can barely boil water, but they do love to eat. In “A Deep-Fried Korean Thanksgiving,” from Season 3, they make cameos at no fewer than four different dinners. Rory’s friend Lane (Keiko Agena) offers a meal featuring Tofurky and a budding relationship. The perfectionist chef Sookie (Melissa McCarthy) watches in horror as her husband deep-fries a turkey. Romantic tensions for both mother and daughter are on the menu at the local diner. Lorelai’s parents serve up the usual stew of guilt and resentment. Just like Thanksgiving dinner itself, the episode is a plate piled high with sweet, salty and deliciously tart moments. (Streaming on Netflix.)‘Happy Endings’Midway through the third and final season of this zany hangout comedy, in an episode called “More Like Stanksgiving,” we finally learn how the crew’s resident married couple got together. It turns out that Jane (Eliza Coupe) and Brad (Damon Wayans Jr.) met when he and her friend Max (Adam Pally) were castmates on an unaired season of MTV’s “The Real World” in 2002. A decade later, Max still has the scrapped footage. In just over 20 minutes, the reliably lightning-paced “Happy Endings” pulls off a perfect reality-TV parody and sheds new light on a few longstanding relationships. (Streaming on Hulu.)“Big Mouth” used a turkey dispute to explore issues of generational trauma.Netflix‘Big Mouth’Nothing says love more warmly than a perfectly roasted turkey (or even tofurkey). Such is the lesson learned by Andrew (John Mulaney) in this Season 5 episode. Andrew’s father (Richard Kind) has anger-management issues related to prepping poultry — he believes insulting the bird is the key to keeping its juices inside. Andrew decries this “turkey tyranny” and refuses to eat. In the end, though, he and his father have a heart-to-heart about their troubled family history. Despite the usual gross-out humor, there is a genuine attempt to address issues of generational trauma — and of course the power of sharing food. (Streaming on Netflix.)‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’Many Thanksgiving episodes sprinkle in references to the holiday’s complicated history. “Buffy” takes the reckoning to an extreme in “Pangs,” from Season 4, in which the bumbling Xander (Nicholas Brendon) inadvertently unleashes the spirit of an Indigenous warrior. As the ghost starts murdering people who disrupted his sacred burial ground, the Slayer (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her friends debate whether it’s right to kill a “vengeance demon” whose grievances are legitimate. The result is a reasonably nuanced debate about whether Americans are responsible for the sins of their ancestors. (Streaming on Hulu.)‘Gossip Girl’Forget, for a moment, the way “Gossip Girl” fell apart at the end. Its first season was a sublime confection sweetened with glamorous costumes and forbidden love, and tempered by heated conflict. All of those elements come together in the Thanksgiving episode, “Blair Waldorf Must Pie!,” which jumps back in time to compare the previous year’s festivities with those of the present. In the past, the beautiful and troubled Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively) got wasted before a dinner with the family of her best friend, Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester). A year later, Serena has cleaned up and Blair is struggling with bulimia. Although the girls are often framed as frenemies, this unusually sentimental episode is a tribute to the way they take care of each other. (Streaming on Max.)‘South Park’If a long weekend of family togetherness makes you desperate for a triple dose of irreverence, Season 17 of “South Park” has you covered. In a trilogy of episodes that begins with “Black Friday,” a local mall braces for the yearly blood bath that begins as soon as the plates are in the dishwasher. For Cartman, that means assembling an army of pint-size gamers to procure the new Xbox at a deep discount. When a pro-Playstation faction splinters off, South Park’s own “Game of Thrones” breaks out, complete with Kenny as Daenerys and a Red Robin Wedding. (Streaming on Max.)“How I Met Your Mother” turned Slapsgiving into one of TV’s abiding holiday traditions.Monty Brinton/CBS‘How I Met Your Mother’It is a holiday of firsts in “Slapsgiving,” the Thanksgiving episode from the third season of this beloved CBS sitcom. Lily (Alyson Hannigan) and Marshall (Jason Segel) are hosting their first Thanksgiving as a married couple. Ted (Josh Radnor) and Robin (Cobie Smulders) have just broken up and are figuring out how to be friends for the first time. This is the first of three Slapsgivings (the others are in Seasons 5 and 9), named for a bet in which Marshall wins the right to slap his obnoxious pal Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) that culminates in the glorious original song “You Just Got Slapped.” Be sure to read Entertainment Weekly’s oral history of the episode after watching. (Streaming on Hulu.)‘Family Ties’This quintessential 1980s family sitcom outdid itself with “No Nukes Is Good Nukes” from Season 1. As the Keaton kids endure their grandmother’s awful cooking, Elyse (Meredith Baxter) and Steven (Michael Gross) relive their hippie youth at a festive Thanksgiving Day nuclear disarmament protest. Of course, the boomer parents end up in jail and their Gen-X children couldn’t be more mortified. It’s a dated story line, but the episode’s message about standing up for your beliefs never gets old. (Streaming on Paramount+.)‘Adam Ruins Everything’Need some ammunition for semi-friendly arguments around the Thanksgiving table? This animated episode, called “The First Factsgiving,” helps dispel many of the beloved myths that have grown around the holiday, including the role of the Native warrior Tisquantum — commonly known as Squanto — in the original Thanksgiving feast in 1621. And about that date: The celebration of Thanksgiving as a fixed, nationwide holiday didn’t come about until the Civil War — a day of mourning for turkeys everywhere. (Streaming on Max.) More

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      Fall TV 2023: New and Returning Shows to Watch

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      Even with much of Hollywood on strike, there will be plenty of notable new and returning shows arriving in the next few months.We’ve been here before. In 2020, to be exact, when it was the pandemic that played havoc with fall network television schedules.The effects of the writers’ and actors’ strikes this year are a little less drastic — they took hold later in the production cycle than the pandemic did, and they only affect American series. But once again we are looking at lineups full of reality programs and game shows. Fox will still have its animation lineup (their long lead times mean more episodes were completed); CBS will repurpose and recycle (“Yellowstone,” the original British “Ghosts”); CW will offer a Canadian smorgasbord. On cable, streaming and PBS, meanwhile, with shorter seasons and more flexible scheduling, the effects are not so noticeable.Here is a roundup of strike-proof shows on fall schedules. Dates are subject to change.September‘THE SUPER MODELS’ Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington Burns are executive producers of this documentary series about their ’90s heyday, which promises to be as luxurious as the goods they modeled. (Apple+, Sept. 20 )‘SEX EDUCATION’ With Moordale Secondary closed, everyone has to get used to a new school in the fourth and final season of this popular, award-winning, sex-positive soap opera. (Netflix, Sept. 21)‘YOUNG LOVE’ “Hair Love,” the Oscar-winning animated short film from 2019 about a Black father learning to style his daughter’s hair, has been expanded into an animated series about a Chicago family. (Max, Sept. 21)‘THE CONTINENTAL: FROM THE WORLD OF JOHN WICK’ Mel Gibson headlines this three-episode extension of the John Wick universe, a prequel focused on a private hotel for assassins called the Continental. Colin Woodell (“The Flight Attendant”), as the future proprietor Winston Scott, has the unenviable task of convincing us that he’s a younger version of Ian McShane. (Peacock, Sept. 22)‘DEADLOCKED: HOW AMERICA SHAPED THE SUPREME COURT’ Dawn Porter (“John Lewis: Good Trouble”) directed this four-part documentary about the modern history of the Supreme Court. (Showtime, Sept. 22)‘KRAPOPOLIS’ Dan Harmon, creator of “Community” and “Rick and Morty,” joins Fox’s Sunday-night lineup with a comedy about a young king (Richard Ayoade) trying to foster civilization in a brightly animated ancient Greece. Fox has ordered three seasons of the show, which if nothing else will provide ample opportunity for the inimitable Matt Berry to voice the king’s father, a debauched half-centaur, half-manticore. (Fox, Sept. 24)Created by Dan Harmon, “Krapopolis” joins Fox’s Sunday night animation lineup.Fox‘THE IRRATIONAL’ Jesse L. Martin, a star of “Rent” on Broadway and a “Law & Order” mainstay for nine seasons, gets his own show for the first time in a three-decade TV career. In mainstream TV’s long tradition of offbeat crime solvers, he plays a behavioral scientist whose quirky team tackles “illogical puzzles and perplexing mysteries.” (NBC, Sept. 25)‘FRIEREN: BEYOND JOURNEY’S END’ This anime series begins after its heroes have completed their ultimate mission; one of the group, the elf Frieren, will outlive her human companions by hundreds of years and come to regret not having known them better. In a genre that gives a lot of space to melancholia, “Frieren” is particularly wistful. (Crunchyroll, Sept. 29)‘GEN V’ Amazon expands the world of its buzziest show, “The Boys,” with a spinoff set in a college for superheroes. (Amazon Prime Video, Sept. 29)October‘BOB’S BURGERS’ Fourteen seasons in (with No. 15 already ordered), Loren Bouchard’s animated comedy remains the sweetest, truest series about family love and dysfunction. With the recent revitalization of “The Simpsons,” it makes Sunday night on Fox the closest thing left to a destination on terrestrial TV. (Fox, Oct. 1)‘FOUND’ Shanola Hampton of “Shameless” stars as a public-relations expert who looks for missing persons of color in NBC’s second new series about an unconventional crime-solving team (after “The Irrational”). (NBC, Oct. 3)Shanola Hampton and Bill Kelly in “Found,” coming to NBC in October.Steve Swisher/NBC‘THE SPENCER SISTERS’ Lea Thompson, starring in a live-action series for the first time since ABC Family’s “Switched at Birth” ended in 2017, plays a Canadian mystery writer who solves crimes with her ex-cop daughter. The joke is that the vain, libidinous mom and the no-nonsense daughter get mistaken for sisters, or so the mother would believe; call it “Murder, She Flirted.” (CW, Oct. 4)‘BARGAIN’ The story line of this Korean series involving an organ auction, a remote location and an earthquake carries some “Squid Game” vibes. (Paramount+, Oct. 5)‘LUPIN’ Netflix’s contemporary take on a classic French character, the turn-of-the-previous-century master thief Arsène Lupin, resurfaces more than two years after its last appearance. Omar Sy returns as the Lupin aficionado Assane Diop, who spent the show’s first two seasons clearing the name of his unjustly imprisoned father. (Netflix, Oct. 5)‘OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH’ David Jenkins’s singular concoction — a queer romance and office sitcom set aboard an 18th-century pirate ship — returns for a second season. (Max, Oct. 5)‘TRANSPLANT’ A pre-strike Canadian import, this conventionally well-made medical drama about a Syrian refugee (Hamza Haq) who becomes a surgeon at a Toronto hospital enters its third season, with Rekha Sharma replacing John Hannah as the chief of the emergency room. (NBC, Oct. 5)‘LOKI’ The most multiverse-y of the Disney+ Marvel series returns for a second season, with Tom Hiddleston as a variant of the shifty Norse god Loki who is reluctantly attached to a timeline-policing authority. The Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan joins the cast. (Disney+, Oct. 6)From left, Tom Hiddleston, Ke Huy Quan and Owen Wilson in “Loki.”Gareth Gatrell/Marvel, via Disney+‘THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER’ Having adapted Shirley Jackson (“The Haunting of Hill House”) and Henry James (“The Haunting of Bly Manor”) for Netflix, Mike Flanagan tackles Edgar Allan Poe in a story that reimagines the Ushers as a big-pharma family. Flanagan regulars like Carla Gugino, Henry Thomas and Michael Trucco return. (Netflix, Oct. 12)‘FRASIER’ Intellectual property that deserves the name. The sparkling sitcom returns with Kelsey Grammer’s sniffy psychiatrist, Frasier Crane, having relocated to Boston (scene of the character’s original incarnation in “Cheers”) after his 1993-2004 run in Seattle. Not making the trip, unfortunately, is David Hyde Pierce as Frasier’s brother, Niles, nor, apparently, any of the other original cast members. (Paramount+, Oct. 12)‘GOOSEBUMPS’ R.L. Stine’s series of comic horror books for teenagers, already the basis of a popular series on Fox Kids in the 1990s, gets a new adaptation created by Nicholas Stoller (“Forgetting Sarah Marshall”) and Rob Letterman (the 2015 “Goosebumps” feature film). (Disney+, Oct. 13)‘LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY’ Apple has shown a taste for shows with a nostalgic flavor, whether or not they are set in the past — “Hello Tomorrow!,” “Physical,” “The Morning Show.” (Remember when morning shows mattered?) Brie Larson stars in this one as a woman in the 1950s who channels her skills as a scientist into hosting a cooking show. (Apple+, Oct. 13)Brie Larson stars in “Lessons in Chemistry” as a scientist turned cooking show host.Apple TV+‘SHINING VALE’ Courteney Cox, as a blocked writer who moves to the suburbs, and Mira Sorvino, as the jealous ghost haunting the writer’s new house, return in a comic take on “The Shining” whose first season was cleverly macabre. (Starz, Oct. 13)‘ANNIKA’ The second season of this under-the-radar British cop show will be American viewers’ only ration of the wonderful actress Nicola Walker this fall, now that “The Split” and her run in “Unforgotten” have ended. Walker plays the leader of a “marine homicide unit” based in Glasgow. (PBS, Oct. 15)‘BILLY THE KID’ It’s not obvious why this workmanlike western with the British actor Tom Blyth in the title role got a second season, but it may have something to do with the track record of its creator, the British writer Michael Hirst, who was also responsible for “The Tudors” and “Vikings.” (MGM+, Oct. 15)‘RICK AND MORTY’ The seventh season of the celebrated sci-fi cartoon will be the first without Justin Roiland, who created the show with Dan Harmon and voiced both of the title characters. (Adult Swim cut ties with Roiland after his 2020 arrest on domestic abuse charges was publicized; the charges have since been dropped.) (Adult Swim, Oct. 15)‘WORLD ON FIRE’ The first season of this British series about ordinary people proving their mettle, or failing to prove it, in the various theaters of World War II was not the most sophisticated of melodramas. The return of Lesley Manville (after a four-year gap between seasons), as a bigoted Manchester woman coping with her son’s sudden acquisition of a Polish wife, makes up for a lot, though. (PBS, Oct. 15)‘THE AMERICAN BUFFALO’ For the first time, Ken Burns directs a documentary that is not about man or man’s accomplishments. (Well, the second time if you count “Not for Ourselves Alone,” the one among his three dozen projects as a director that focuses specifically on women.) But the four-hour series is equal parts human history and natural history, as it traces the intertwined fates of the bison and the tribes that depended on them. (PBS, Oct. 16)‘EVERYONE ELSE BURNS’ The CW slips a British comedy onto its menu of mostly Canadian series. Simon Bird of “The Inbetweeners” and Kate O’Flynn of “Landscapers” play the parents in a family that struggles with the strictures of their Christian sect, whose many no-nos include drinking coffee and celebrating birthdays. (CW, Oct. 16)Simon Bird and Kate O’Flynn star in “Everyone Else Burns,” a British import coming to the CW.James Stack/CW‘NEON’ Three friends portrayed by Tyler Dean Flores (who plays the singer), Emma Ferreira (the overbearing manager) and Jordan Mendoza (the social media geek) move to Miami in search of reggaeton stardom in a comedy whose executive producers include the Taylor Swift antagonist Scooter Braun. (Netflix, Oct. 19)‘WOLF LIKE ME’ This Australian dark comedy is a mix of rom-com and broken-family drama in which one character’s being a werewolf is both the classic impediment to true love and an all-purpose allegory of the need for safety in relationships. Its first season was slight, amusing and often moving. (Peacock, Oct. 19)‘30 COINS’ The Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia’s entertainingly lurid thriller about a demonic conspiracy focused on a small village gets a second season and a substantial new cast member, Paul Giamatti, who plays a mysterious American tech billionaire. (HBO, Oct. 23)‘LIFE ON OUR PLANET’ The creators of British series like “Planet Earth” and “Our Planet” join forces with Industrial Light and Magic and Steven Spielberg for a natural-history series about the ebb and flow of life across the eons, which provides copious opportunities for animating the 99 percent of earth’s species that have gone extinct. (Netflix, Oct. 25)‘FELLOW TRAVELERS’ Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey star as clandestine lovers in a nostalgic march-of-history mini-series — McCarthyism, Vietnam, disco, AIDS — written by Ron Nyswaner (“Philadelphia”), based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Mallon. (Paramount+, Oct. 27; Showtime, Oct. 29)‘THIS ENGLAND’ Hamlet and Hercule Poirot are all well and good, but here’s a real challenge for Kenneth Branagh: playing the Brexit-boosting, Covid-partying former prime minister of Britain, Boris Johnson, in a six-episode mini-series written by Michael Winterbottom and Kieron Quirke. (BritBox, Nov. 1)‘ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE’ Steven Knight, creator of “Peaky Blinders,” developed this mini-series from Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer-winning World War II romantic thriller about a brave, blind French girl and a German boy whose technical skills pull him into the Nazi army. Marie-Laure, the blind heroine, is played by Aria Mia Loberti, a Fulbright scholar, disability advocate and first-time actor; Marie-Laure’s father and great-uncle are played by the more seasoned Mark Ruffalo and Hugh Laurie. (Netflix, Nov. 2)Aria Mia Loberti, a first-time actor, stars in an adaptation of the novel “All the Light We Cannot See.”Katalin Vermes/Netflix‘LAWMEN: BASS REEVES’ Originally billed as yet another spinoff of “Yellowstone,” the latest show from the executive producer Taylor Sheridan is now an anthology series that will feature various real-life old-west lawmen. The first season stars David Oyelowo as Reeves, a formerly enslaved man who developed a formidable reputation as a deputy U.S. marshal. Lauren E. Banks plays Reeves’s wife and the cast includes Dennis Quaid, Donald Sutherland and Shea Whigham. (Paramount+, Nov. 5)‘THE BUCCANEERS’ “A group of fun-loving young American girls explode into the tightly corseted London season of the 1870s,” according to the press release, which sounds like a cross between “Downton Abbey” and a reality dating competition (never mind that it’s based on an unfinished Edith Wharton novel). (Apple TV+, Nov. 8)‘FOR ALL MANKIND’ Equal parts soap opera and engaging alt-history of the space race — you didn’t see the North Korean thing coming, did you? — “Mankind” jumps ahead another decade for its fourth season, with international partners uneasily working together to mine asteroids in 2003. (Apple TV+, Nov. 10)‘BELGRAVIA: THE NEXT CHAPTER’ Written by Julian Fellowes (“Downton Abbey”) and starring redoubtable British performers like Tamsin Greig and Harriet Walter, the mini-series “Belgravia,” about 1840s London society, was a distinct pleasure. This sequel jumps ahead 30 years and has a new cast and a new writer, Helen Edmundson (“Dalgliesh”). (MGM+, Nov. 12)‘PARIS POLICE 1905’ The first season of this historical police procedural — titled “Paris Police 1900” and set when the procedures we’re used to seeing were being invented — was handsomely produced, crazily plotted and consistently entertaining. The new season returns most of the cast (with the regrettable exception of Valérie Dashwood’s laudanum-sniffing, steel-nerved Mme. Lépine) and adds automobiles. (MHz Choice, Nov. 14)‘MONARCH: LEGACY OF MONSTERS’ Kurt Russell’s last regular role in a series was nearly 50 years ago, in the 1976 western “The Quest,” so kudos to Legendary Pictures and Apple for talking him into starring in their Godzilla-adjacent MonsterVerse mystery. It’s a package deal: Russell and his son Wyatt both play the central character, an Army officer somehow connected to kaiju research and development. That would seem to prevent them from appearing onscreen together, but we can always hope for a time warp. (Apple TV+, Nov. 17)‘SCOTT PILGRIM TAKES OFF’ Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novels about a mopey Toronto bassist who is also, accidentally, a video-game warrior — already made into a 2010 film starring Michael Cera, “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” — are now adapted into an anime series produced by the Japanese studio Science SARU. O’Malley is on board as a writer and showrunner. (Netflix, Nov. 17)‘FARGO’ After an underwhelming sojourn in 1950s Kansas City in its fourth season, Noah Hawley’s arch rural noir heads back north to Minnesota and North Dakota for a story starring Jon Hamm as a sheriff and Juno Temple as the woman he’s hunting for. The typically eclectic cast includes Dave Foley, Lamorne Morris and Jennifer Jason Leigh. (FX, Nov. 21)‘ECHO’ Like alien invaders sending out spores, Marvel series multiply on Disney+. This one — starring Alaqua Cox as the Native American hero who can perfectly mimic movement and Zahn McClarnon as her father — is an offshoot of “Hawkeye,” from 2021. But it lies closer to “Daredevil” in the Marvel narrative architecture, so Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio are also in the cast as Daredevil and the Kingpin. (Disney+, Nov. 29)December‘PERCY JACKSON AND THE OLYMPIANS’ Ten years after the second and, so far, final Percy Jackson film, Walker Scobell (he played Ryan Reynolds’s younger self in “The Adam Project”) takes on the role of the 12-year-old demigod in a new series. (Disney+, Dec. 20)Other returning shows: “American Horror Story” (FX, Sept. 20); “Starstruck” (Max, Sept. 28); “The Simpsons” (Fox, Oct. 1); “Family Guy” (Fox, Oct. 1); “Magnum P.I.” (NBC, Oct. 4); “Quantum Leap” (NBC, Oct. 4); “Creepshow” (Shudder, Oct. 13); “Hotel Portofino” (PBS, Oct. 15); “Bosch: Legacy” (Freevee, Oct. 20); “Upload” (Amazon Prime Video, Oct. 20); “Native America” (PBS, Oct. 24); “American Horror Stories” (FX on Hulu, Oct. 26); “Shoresy” (Hulu, Oct. 27); “The Gilded Age” (HBO, Oct. 29); “Invincible” (Amazon Prime Video, Nov. 3); “Rap Sh!t” (Max, Nov. 9); “Julia” (Max, Nov. 16); “Power Book III: Raising Kanan” (Starz, Dec. 1) More

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      Justin Roiland Leaves ‘Rick and Morty’ After Domestic Abuse Charges

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      The title roles will be recast because Adult Swim has severed ties with Justin Roiland, the animated show’s co-creator.The animated sci-fi comedy “Rick and Morty” will recast its title roles after severing ties with Justin Roiland, a voice actor and the show’s co-creator, who has a pretrial hearing in April for felony domestic abuse charges from 2020.Adult Swim, Cartoon Network’s nighttime adult programming block, announced on Tuesday that it had “ended its association” with Roiland. “Rick and Morty will continue,” the statement said. “The talented and dedicated crew are hard at work on Season 7.”Roiland has also been removed from the animated Hulu comedy “Solar Opposites,” according to a statement by 20th Television Animation and Hulu Originals. He co-created the show, which was renewed for a fifth season in October, and voiced one of the main characters, Korvo.“Rick and Morty,” which debuted in 2013, follows the antics of Rick Sanchez, an alcoholic mad scientist, and his anxiety-riddled grandson, Morty Smith, as they travel to other planets and through myriad dimensions. Marie Moore, the senior vice president of communications at Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns Cartoon Network, said in an email on Wednesday that the title characters would be recast but that she had ​​no additional information on the recasting.Roiland developed the show with Dan Harmon, the creator of “Community,” who did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Roiland faces one felony count of domestic battery with corporal injury and one felony count of false imprisonment by menace, violence, fraud and/or deceit against an unnamed woman he was dating in 2020, according to Orange County Superior Court records. The charges were earlier reported by NBC News, which said most of the California court records are sealed under a protective order.There is no trial date for Roiland, 42, who has pleaded not guilty. He has had more than a dozen pretrial hearings, including one this month.Roiland’s lawyer, T. Edward Welbourn, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday. In a statement to Rolling Stone, he said: “It is hard to overstate how inaccurate the recent media coverage of this situation has been. To be clear, not only is Justin innocent, but we also have every expectation that this matter is on course to be dismissed.”In addition to his television departures, Roiland recently resigned from the video game studio he co-founded, Squanch Games, which released High on Life last month.In 2018, “Rick and Morty” landed a 70-episode renewal deal from Adult Swim that it is halfway through. At that time, Adult Swim said the third season had earned the block’s highest ratings ever. More

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      Adult Swim: How an Animation Experiment Conquered Late-Night TV

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      Cartoon Network’s nighttime adult programming block, which turns 20 this week, was built on lo-fi animation techniques that were as much a no-budget necessity as an aesthetic choice.By all accounts, it was a minor miracle that Adult Swim ever made it off the drawing board 20 years ago. Money was next to nonexistent. The editor of Cartoon Network’s first original series worked from a closet. A celebrity guest on that series, unaware of the weirdness he had signed up for, walked out mid-taping.In retrospect, it seems right that one of modern TV’s most consistent generators of bizarro humor — and cult followings — had origins that were, themselves, pretty freewheeling.“It was really just a labor of love,” Mike Lazzo, who oversaw programming for Adult Swim before he retired in 2019, said. “I think the audience could tell that and responded to it.”Early on, the idea was to create a late-night programming block for Cartoon Network’s sizable adult audience. What resulted was a hit, and over the years, Adult Swim’s early lo-fi aesthetic — as much a necessity as a choice, Lazzo said — attracted ambitious, out-of-the-box ideas, including an animated show starring a talking wad of meat (“Aqua Teen Hunger Force”), a cheesy talk show hosted by a Hanna-Barbera superhero (“Space Ghost Coast to Coast”) and a surreal, live-action satire of clumsy public-access TV (“Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!”).“Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” one of Adult Swim’s first series, features a character named Meatwad, right, a ball of meat scraps that the F.D.A. wouldn’t allow into a hamburger.Cartoon Network“We wouldn’t have fit in anywhere else,” said Tim Heidecker, who with Eric Wareheim created “Awesome Show” and has worked on several other Adult Swim series since. “There’s no other place on TV that made sense for us, and maybe that’s still the case.”Ahead of the 20th anniversary of Adult Swim’s Sept. 2, 2001, premiere, its creators, leaders, writers, animators and others spoke about the lean early days, the anything-goes atmosphere and the enduring legacy of their ambitious experiment. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.In the early 1990s, Cartoon Network found itself in an unusual situation: It controlled a sprawling animation library but didn’t have the budget to make animated shows of its own. Then a group of executives and cartoonists, led by Lazzo, proposed the idea of recycling the animation from Hanna-Barbera’s 1960s “Space Ghost” cartoon. They reimagined the titular superhero as a cheesy talk show host who interviewed real celebrities in a new show, “Space Ghost Coast to Coast,” which became the network’s first original series when it premiered on April 15, 1994.MIKE LAZZO (former executive vice president and creative director of Adult Swim) I got fed up reading over and over that we were nothing but a Hanna-Barbera rerun channel — which was, of course, true.BETTY COHEN (founding president of Cartoon Network) Mike Lazzo booked some time to come see me one day and said, “I want to show you something my team and I have been working on.” He put a VHS cassette into my machine, and it was the first incarnation of “Space Ghost.” It was so rough that there were times when he was having to personally narrate, and it was all on a rotoscope, which is sort of like cutting and pasting. But I immediately saw the potential. For the earliest funding, I actually allocated money from the marketing budget.LAZZO We went to Los Angeles and hired a reputable production house to make a pilot, which cost us $100,000, but we got it back and hated it. We were like, “This looks good, but it isn’t funny.” So we brought it back to Atlanta and did it ourselves for $25,000. Michael Cahill [now the vice president of on-air and social media for Adult Swim] would edit it in a closet that was just sitting empty.“There’s no other place on TV that made sense for us, and maybe that’s still the case,” said Tim Heidecker, left, who with Eric Wareheim created the sketch series “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” Adult SwimDAVE WILLIS (co-creator of “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” and “Squidbillies,” writer on “Space Ghost Coast to Coast”) We did the interviews over speaker phone, and we’d immediately ask guests the craziest stuff we could come up with — are you getting enough oxygen? What are your superpowers? Paul Westerberg [the musician and member of the Replacements] had never seen the show and walked out on me. He was like, “I don’t have time for this B.S.” That was when we started getting people to sign the waiver before they’d do the interview.The show gained a cult following among teens and young adults. Around 1998, Cartoon Network executives began thinking about another conundrum: how they could fill their ad space late at night, after young viewers went to sleep.MICHAEL OUWELEEN (president of Adult Swim) We started to notice that, at any given time, a third of the people watching Cartoon Network were adults who weren’t parents.LAZZO Our ad department could not sell late-night or overnight time periods on Cartoon Network — no one wanted to advertise to kids after 10 p.m.COHEN The question was, how could we appeal to a young adult audience without destroying our relationship with parents?Lazzo, who oversaw programming for the network, saw the potential of creating a late-night block of shows geared specifically toward adults.JIM SAMPLES (general manager and executive vice president of Cartoon Network when Adult Swim launched) Mike came into my office with a deck he’d put together, describing how he was going to produce all the on-air packaging for Adult Swim on practically zero budget, basically on someone’s computer. All the money that was being spent on fairly high-end packaging for the network, he wanted to divert to original programming. I was blown away by the idea. But we were dealing with resistance from our ad sales team. As a kids’ network, how were we going to actively market to adults? Was it a violation of our contract with cable operators? I put my career on the line to say it was a good idea.OUWELEEN We were given one year to name this thing, brand it and make the content — it was like a gauntlet thrown down. It was a very small group of us doing all of that in addition to our regular jobs at Cartoon Network. I can’t tell you how complicated it was. The creative team I was running came up with four names: “Aviso,” which means “warning” in Spanish; “Parental Block” — on cable boxes at the time, you could set the parental block to stop kids from watching stuff; “Insert Quarter,” like a video game; and Adult Swim. Lazzo always hated the name.LAZZO Blech! To this day, I hate that name. I still think it should be called “Cartoon Network After Dark.” Adult Swim is too clever by half for my taste.The first promotions for Adult Swim, which aired late at night, featured older adults swimming in a public pool, with a voice-over by a lifeguard: “Sundays at 10, it’s all kids out of the pool for adult swim.”OUWELEEN We wanted to send a definitive signal to kids: “This is not for you.” That’s why we chose old people at the pool — to scare kids away. We filmed an old-person aerobics class at the M.L.K. Natatorium here in Atlanta, and then we made [some of the footage] black-and-white to make it even more unattractive.Some of the first original Adult Swim shows, including “Space Ghost Coast to Coast” and “Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law,” were parodies or remixes of Hanna-Barbera superhero cartoons. Another, “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” drew its heroes from fast food.“Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law” was another early, inexpensively produced Adult Swim show that repurposed old Hanna-Barbera characters.Cartoon NetworkWILLIS The idea for “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” started with a [expletive] fast food restaurant that tried to use all the scraps of meat they weren’t allowed by the F.D.A. to put into a hamburger, wadded together. We saw Meatwad as this poor, neglected creature — I think his line in his first script was like [in Meatwad voice], “Please, God, kill me.” I did the voice, and I can’t tell you how many times people said, “I don’t understand what he’s saying; you need to recast him.” But we stuck to our guns. I always thought of it like Willie Nelson, who sings real quietly, and so everyone is on the edge of their seat trying to listen to what he’s saying. As a result, you’re more into it. At least, that was my excuse! [Laughs.]Adult Swim officially debuted on Sept. 2, 2001, and aired two nights a week from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. It kicked off with a new episode of “Home Movies,” a series that had been canceled midseason on UPN. The show, which featured the voice talents of H. Jon Benjamin (“Bob’s Burgers”), developed a devoted following during its second life on Adult Swim, as did other shows, like “Family Guy,” later on.WILLIS We were beating all the networks in the most prized demographic: men with money to spend. I distinctly remember bumping into the guy running ad sales in the bathroom. He said something to the effect of, “Wow, you really pulled that [expletive] out of the fire!” I was like, “What do you mean?” And he said, “I saw that thing [“Aqua Teen Hunger Force”] and I can’t believe I have to promote it as one of our new shows, but you guys really turned that around.” It was good to know we were thought of so highly. [Laughs.]The Adult Swim audience grew, and the block expanded. The shows got weirder and more experimental as they branched out from animation to live-action shows like the influential “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” (2007-10). Heidecker and Wareheim previously had created the similarly eccentric animated series “Tom Goes to the Mayor” (2004-2006) for Adult Swim.LAZZO After “Tom Goes to the Mayor,” Tim and Eric could pretty much come in and tell us what they wanted to do. And with “Awesome Show,” we knew when we were watching it that this was like no sketch comedy we’d ever seen. It changed the tempo of comedy and influenced so many young comedians. The editing style alone became pervasive.One of Adult Swim’s most critically successful series, “Rick and Morty,” has earned two Emmys for best animated series since its debut in 2013.Adult SwimTIM HEIDECKER We never took the writing part that seriously. We’d gather people for a couple of days and sit around and pitch very loose ideas, and then Eric and I would map out the kinds of bits we wanted to do. I hear about these writers’ rooms that are, like, 12-hour days, trying to break every joke and write everything ahead of time, and we were just like, “That’s a fool’s errand.” Give us something to start the process, and we’ll go from there.ERIC WAREHEIM That continued into the editing. There were moments we’d laugh so hard we’d literally cry because we loved our work so much. We were doing things we’d never seen before in comedy or on TV.HEIDECKER It seemed good at the time — we probably should’ve kept doing it.Twenty years later, Adult Swim airs seven nights a week. The lineup includes shows like “Rick and Morty,” which has won two Emmys for best animated series, and “Tuca & Bertie,” a critical darling that was rescued from oblivion after Netflix canceled it.OUWELEEN We joke that Covid finally put to bed every story headlined “Is adult animation a thing?”WAREHEIM We’re working pretty much the same way we worked 25 years ago — we get lunch and talk about ideas, and if we laugh, we write it down. If we don’t, it disappears.LAZZO I used to tell people I could ruin Adult Swim in two weeks — put on the wrong programs, be crass in the presentation. You can’t be greedy; you have to do things for the right reasons and not because they sell. As long as that remains the lamp, Adult Swim will continue forever. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘The Celebrity Dating Game’ and a Father’s Day Special

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      “The Dating Game” gets a celebrity revival, “Rick and Morty” returns and Oprah Winfrey hosts a Black Father’s Day special with Sterling K. Brown.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, June 14-20. Details and times are subject to change. More

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      The ‘Solar Opposites’ Creators Apologize for Their Clairvoyance

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      Who knew an animated series about misanthropic space aliens could feel so relevant? Mike McMahan and Justin Roiland explained ahead of Season 2 why it isn’t their fault.Half of them hate it, half of them love it. But nobody knows more about American pop culture than the aliens in “Solar Opposites,” who have crash-landed in suburbia and absorbed the culture as voraciously as Daryl Hannah’s TV-addicted mermaid in “Splash.” Justin Roiland, who created the animated series for Hulu with Mike McMahan, believes he would do the same thing if he found himself on their home, on the utopian planet of Shlorp.“I would be up all night watching their TV,” Roiland said in a group video call earlier this month. “I’d know more than they did about their own stupid movies and culture and pop culture. It makes sense that these aliens would just have this insane list of like all these stupid things that they’ve watched.”That level of pop obsession carries over from their work on “Rick and Morty,” the Adult Swim hit Roiland created with Dan Harmon, for which he also voiced both title characters. McMahan wrote scripts for all four seasons of that show, and the two seem to anticipate a self-awareness from their audience that allows their creations to speak in winking shorthand. Terry (voiced by Thomas Middleditch), a frog-mouthed connoisseur of trash art and junk food, often refers to his makeshift Shlorpian family as “the solar opposites,” as if he knows they’re in a TV show. (A lot of jokes come at Hulu’s expense, too.) Korvo (Roiland), his sour egghead counterpart, is able to “sci-fi” his way in and out of sticky situations with an endless supply of high-tech, plot-resolving gizmos.The series is in many respects an affectionate riff on family sitcoms. “When we do switch into sitcom mode, we want our family to feel like a family,” McMahan said.FOXAmong the gizmos deployed in the eight-episode second season, which arrives in full on Friday, is a “Lake House” device: a mailbox that sends messages back and forth from separate points in time, a reference to the high-concept 2006 romance of the same name starring Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves. Then there’s a single-use gun that converts a natural landscape into thriving urban center, with one hilariously grisly twist.Roiland and McMahan’s penchant for pocket universes continues this season with more intrigue inside “the Wall,” a terrarium that the high school misanthrope Yumyulack (Sean Giambrone), Korvo’s “replicant,” has filled with the miniaturized bodies of people he dislikes. As Yumyulack and Jesse (Mary Mack), Terry’s cheery replicant, go obliviously about their teenage lives, the miniature society of the Wall evolves behind them, as the former resistance hero Tim (Andy Daly) becomes the new lord of the flies — or, perhaps, the terror of tiny town.Speaking from their home offices in Los Angeles, Roiland and McMahan talked about their own love-hate relationship with pop culture, how the show fiddles with sitcom and sci-fi conventions and where the real world intersected with the sandbox society of the Wall. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. (The conversation took place before accusations of sexual misconduct against Middleditch were reported by the Los Angeles Times; Hulu declined to comment on the accusations.)“Solar Opposites” is a situation comedy. There’s a family in a house. There’s an odd couple at the center of it. It has a fish-out-of-water quality to it. How do you see the show fitting into that tradition?MIKE McMAHAN: We grew up watching those shows and loving those shows and wanted a show that felt like, at a distance or at certain moments, it lived in the world that those shows created — or if not the world, at least in the format or at least the comfort level that audiences would have with it.JUSTIN ROILAND: There’s something really fun and whimsical about these characters and the fact we’re putting them in a sitcom-y world allows us to do some of the insane [expletive] we want to do that we’ve never seen in that framework.McMAHAN: At the same time, when we do switch into sitcom mode, we want our family to feel like a family. Terry and Korvo love each other, and they love the replicants, and they love the family that they’re in. And so we have these emotional stories we’re telling, and then [expletive] goes off the rails all the time.The alien characters in “Solar Opposites” often speak in winking shorthand that is self-aware and deeply versed in American culture.FOXAs for that science-fiction part of the show, the characters here often use the term “sci-fi” to explain whatever gadget they might be using to get out of scrapes. How do you see “Solar Opposites” fitting into that tradition?McMAHAN: That’s something Justin and Dan [Harmon] really created with the pilot of “Rick and Morty” because Rick is able to call things out and be like, “Look, this is just some sci-fi [expletive] we’re dealing with today.” It’s a very Rick sentiment. And then once we’d worked on “Rick and Morty” for a number of seasons, it just felt good. There were some things in “Solar Opposites” that felt like they were conventions we could just do away with.One of them was, we didn’t want to do a show where a human on the street would be like, “Ahhh, an alien!” It was more interesting to us to have everybody be fine with it.ROILAND: I think for me it’s important not to get caught up in the silly gun and how does it work, you know what I mean? It’s more about the emotional core of the characters and what are they going through. What are these characters feeling? How do I relate to them? It doesn’t matter that somebody got a schmoogie schmoogun, and what does it do?McMAHAN: We get freed up to get to have fun and make more jokes when you’re tracking what the characters want, as opposed to how the tech works. And at the same time, we were like, “Let’s lean into the absurdity of sci-fi.” It’s like how Doctor Who’s Tardis can be bigger on the inside than on the outside. You go, “Ah, it’s sci-fi stuff. It’s a static work bubble or whatever …”ROILAND: Yeah. It’s like an iPhone to somebody from the early ’90 or early ’80s. It’d be like, “What is this?”McMAHAN: “Look at this magic.”ROILAND: “It’s magic, don’t worry about it.”McMAHAN: Whenever we need it for jokes, [the aliens] can open up a panel on the ship and be like, “Oh, here’s the gun that turns you into an elephant for this episode.” Because the point of the sci-fi isn’t, “Wow. We’ve really gamed out that somebody will one day be able to make an elephant gun.” It’s more, would it be wrong to use this elephant gun in this situation?Fundamental to the show is the premise that half of the Solars like the planet and half do not. But the basis of their disagreement seems to be rooted specifically in American pop culture and the way it has shaped humankind. Do you feel that conflict within yourselves? Is their disagreement an expression of that? Of both loving and hating American pop culture?McMAHAN: One hundred percent.ROILAND: Yeah, absolutely. There’s so much stuff to love and hate. To me, it’s funny that these aliens know more about [expletive] than I do even.McMAHAN: We’re both kids of the ’80s. We both grew up just loving TV and comics and video games and toys, and just the packaging and food that you have to cook in the microwave, and oatmeal that you can put sugar dinosaur eggs in.ROILAND: But at the same time, we know we’re self-hating consumers. We know that that’s bad for the environment and we have to do better. And it’s important to us that we leave the world a better place than we found it. And that’s hard when we also want toys.McMahan and Roiland weren’t worried about explaining all the sci-fi tech. “It’s important not to get caught up in the silly gun and how does it work,” Roiland said.Jessica Lehrman for The New York TimesI wouldn’t describe “Solar Opposites” as a terribly political show, but do you see the Wall as a way to kind of comment on how societies are built? Are there opportunities that this “Lord of the Flies” situation has given you?McMAHAN: Absolutely. From the pitch, that’s what it was.ROILAND: Let’s just be honest. Let’s get it out there, I was playing that … what was that game?McMAHAN: The Vault-Tec game.ROILAND: Yeah. The“Fallout Shelter” game.McMAHAN: There’s iOS games where you control little worlds, and you have to manage the food.ROILAND: And they had just announced it at E3 [an annual gaming expo], and they’re like, “And it’s free and it’s available right now.” So I downloaded it. This is around the time we were developing the show and I’m playing it and I was like: “Oh my God, wouldn’t it be fun to just have these kids shrinking humans? And then let’s just play with society.”What would a small town look like in the wall of these kids’ room? How would they form law? Because at that point it’s like: “Hey, we’re not in America anymore. We’re not in anywhere on Earth. We’re in our own ecosystem. We make the law. We make the rules.” And it’s sort of like how a pod in a prison might work. You know what I mean? It’s like: “Who knows if the strongest are going to be the ones making the law? Or the most intelligent?”But anyway, yes, it’s very fascinating to play around in that sandbox because humans are very interesting and society is interesting. How did we end up where we are now? It’s ridiculous. And when is it going to collapse? Tomorrow? A couple of days from now?McMAHAN: When we started writing “Solar Opposites,” we weren’t paying attention to politics. This was pre-2016. This was before I knew the name of everybody in the cabinet and who the secretary of the Treasury is, and I think we’re all, maybe against our own best wishes, our own wishes, more political than we used to be. And what we originally were trying to build in the Wall is, we wanted something that felt comfortably serialized in a mythologically broad and storytelling way — where you understand that when communities are created in a crisis that heroes and villains rise. We grew up seeing stories like that. You see that with, like, you said, “Lord of the Flies.” I would say, “Under the Dome” or “Escape From New York.” It’s a very sci-fi sort of sensibility.ROILAND: It was so funny to Trojan horse that dramatic human story into this crazy comedy.McMAHAN: Sorry we accurately predicted this weird proto-fascist era with our Wall story. That was our bad. More