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      How to Watch the Golden Globes 2024: Date, Time, Streaming

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      Hollywood usually looks to the annual awards as a party, but this year they also have an unlikely mission: A bid for relevance.The bar for a successful Golden Globes is usually low: Did at least one winner crack an acceptance-speech joke they’d probably regret the next day? Was there unpredictable political pontificating? Was the champagne still flowing into the wee hours?But then a Los Angeles Times investigation in 2021 revealed that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the eccentric, cloistered nonprofit of about 85 journalists that voted on the Golden Globes for some seven decades, had exactly zero Black members. The event has spent the last two years undergoing a reboot: The H.F.P.A. was dissolved. Private ownership took over, and new leadership was hired.This year, the Globes are back on TV, in their normal Sunday-night slot. (NBC didn’t broadcast the event in 2022, and last year’s pared-back Globes were booted to a Tuesday night because of football.) Now they’re on CBS, and a diversified voting body of more than 300 entertainment journalists has chosen the winners and added two new categories. (Oh, and they also found a new way to nominate Taylor Swift.)Will it be enough to win back audiences? (The 2023 Globes had about 6.3 million viewers, down 10 percent from the last televised Globes ceremony in 2021; by comparison, the Oscars draw about 19 million viewers.) Will the A-listers show up? Will the ceremony be a nod to the boozy, freewheeling affairs of old or play it more strait-laced like last year’s sober — some said, “boring” — ceremony?We’ll find out Sunday night. Here’s how to watch.What time does the show start, and where can I watch?The ceremony begins at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif. CBS is the official television broadcaster.Online, you can watch the show live on the CBS app, which is free to download, though you’ll need to sign in using the credentials from your cable provider. The show will also stream on Paramount+, though only subscribers who have the Showtime add-on will be able to watch live. For those who do not, the ceremony can be streamed beginning Monday on Paramount+. There are also a number of live TV streaming services that offer access to CBS, including Hulu + Live TV, YouTube TV and FuboTV, which all require subscriptions, though many are offering free trials.Is there a red carpet?Variety will stream red carpet arrivals beginning at 6:30 p.m. Eastern, 3:30 p.m. Pacific on its website and social media platforms as part of the official Globes preshow, which will be hosted by the Variety journalists Marc Malkin and Angelique Jackson and the “Entertainment Tonight” correspondent Rachel Smith. You can also watch on ETonline.com or the Golden Globes website.Who is hosting?The comedian and actor Jo Koy, who has released multiple Netflix specials and starred in the comedy movie “Easter Sunday” in 2022, will take the reins for the first time.Who is presenting?The lineup of actors, comedians and musicians who will hand out awards includes Amanda Seyfried, America Ferrera, Angela Bassett, Daniel Kaluuya, Florence Pugh, Gabriel Macht, George Lopez, Issa Rae, Julia Garner, Justin Hartley, Michelle Yeoh, Oprah Winfrey and Will Ferrell.Who votes on the awards?With the H.F.P.A. dissolved, an expanded group of more than 300 entertainment journalists from around the world is now responsible for selecting the nominees and winners. And the Globes have promised it’s a much more diverse group that now includes Black voters.What’s new this year?The Globes introduced two new categories, one for stand-up comedy on television and the other for blockbuster films — defined as those taking in at least $100 million at the domestic box office and $150 million worldwide (hello, “Barbie”-”Oppenheimer”-“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” showdown).With the exception of the blockbuster category, which has eight slots, the categories now have six nominees each, up from five. In other words, more stars to populate the televised ceremony and the red carpet spectacle.Who is nominated?“Barbie,” Greta Gerwig’s live-action take on the popular doll, leads the pack with eight nominations, including three in the original song category. (Yes, “I’m Just Ken” made the cut.) Close on its heels is “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s three-hour blockbuster biopic about the theoretical physicist who led the effort that produced the first nuclear weapons. It’s up for best drama, director and actor, among other awards.On the TV side, it looks to be a big night for “Succession,” which ended last spring and earned a record nine nominations. The audience favorites “The Bear” and “Only Murders in the Building” picked up five apiece.What should you watch for?“Oppenheimer” will be looking to bolster its case at the Oscars with wins here in the best drama and director categories. But don’t count out “Killers of the Flower Moon,” whose female lead, Lily Gladstone, could become the first Indigenous performer to win best actress in a drama.Among the TV nominees, Meryl Streep, who is up for best supporting actress in a comedy for her role as the actress Loretta Durkin in Season 3 of “Only Murders in the Building,” could break her own record for the most Golden Globe acting wins with a victory (this would be her ninth statuette). Ali Wong, who played a successful businesswoman drawn into a road-rage-fueled feud in the Netflix comedy “Beef,” could become the first actress of Asian descent to win best actress in the limited series category.And, if “Succession” wins best drama, it will tie the record for most wins in the category (currently held by “Mad Men” and “The X-Files,” which each have three).Will Taylor Swift be there?The singer picked up her fifth Golden Globe nomination, for her concert film, “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” thanks to the new blockbuster film category, but no word yet on her plans for the evening. Will the winners in the TV categories offer any hints about the Emmys next week?What a strange year: The dual actors’ and writers’ strikes that largely brought Hollywood to a standstill also bumped the Emmys from their normal September spot, even though voting took place in June. They’re now set to air after Jan. 15, even though the winners for the 2022-23 season were locked in months ago. Which is to say: Nope! More

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      A Reinvented ‘True Detective’ Plays It Cool

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      There were times, a year ago, in Iceland, on a glacier, in the dark, in temperatures well below freezing, when Issa López thought to herself: “Who wrote this? What is wrong with this person?” López, the showrunner and director of Season 4 of the HBO anthology series “True Detective,” had only herself to blame.This shivery “True Detective,” subtitled “Night Country,” premieres on Jan. 14. Set in Ennis, a fictional town in northwest Alaska, it stars Jodie Foster as the chief of police and Kali Reis as an intimidating state trooper. Opening just as the area descends into months of unrelieved darkness, the six-episode season has an icy milieu and a female gaze forcefully distinct from the show’s past outings.Created by Nic Pizzolatto, “True Detective” debuted nearly a decade ago as a bayou noir starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. Sultry, macho and spanning two timelines set 17 years apart, it entwined a familiar serial killer investigation with sweaty philosophy and intimations of the supernatural. Though that first season had its critics, it made for essential, much debated viewing. The second season, set in an unglamorous Southern California exurb and starring Colin Farrell, Taylor Kitsch, Rachel McAdams and Vince Vaughn, made a smaller, grimmer splash, as did the third season, which starred Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff and relocated the action to the Ozarks.That third season, which premiered in January 2019, attracted significantly fewer viewers. That might have meant the end of “True Detective.” But HBO believed the franchise could continue. The network began to search for a new showrunner for Season 4, preferably a woman of color. (Earlier seasons skewed overwhelmingly male and largely white, in front of the camera and behind it.) Among the potential candidates was López, a Mexican filmmaker who had written and directed a roster of Spanish-language features, including “Tigers Are Not Afraid,” a movie about missing and murdered women and children that mingled crime, fantasy and horror.Foster was drawn in by the original script but asked that her character, a somewhat blinkered white woman, be aged up and that the story’s center to be ceded to Reis’s.Michele K. Short/HBOThat film impressed Francesca Orsi, HBO’s head of drama. The essence of “True Detective,” Orsi said by phone in a recent interview, “is the way in which the horror genre is encapsulated within the detective noir narrative.” Confident that López could accomplish this, Orsi invited her to pitch a new season.López had spent nearly two decades pitching American networks and studios. She understood that network interest was no guarantee that a project would be made. And she knew that when it came to English-language work, she would be considered a risk, untried. So she decided there was no harm in dreaming big. And dark. And cold.“You write the impossible,” López said during a video call last month. “You write what you want to see.”Though López grew up in more temperate climates, she is a fan of the John Carpenter horror movie “The Thing,” set in Antarctica, and of the Alaskan vampire comic “30 Days of Night.” Assuming the project would never be greenlighted, she wrote what she wanted to see: an “existential whodunit,” as she put it, set in Alaska’s furthest, iciest reaches. To her surprise and mild dismay, HBO said yes.“It was so much fun to dream that world,” López said. “Except then I had to go there and shoot it.”López decided there was no harm in dreaming big when she pitched HBO her idea for the new season of “True Detective.” “You write the impossible,” she said. “You write what you want to see.”This season — the first without Pizzolatto, though he retains an executive producer credit — can be seen as a photo negative of the first. It is chilly rather than steamy, shadowed rather than sunlit, tundra-dry instead of humid. Despite occasional flashbacks, it restricts itself to a single timeline. In the first season, women appeared mostly as beleaguered wives or prostitutes. Here the gaze and the detectives are defiantly female.Is this still “True Detective”? While Pizzolatto was not available for comment, López argues that it is. This season retains what she sees as the series’s essentials: two detectives, shrouded in secrets and enmeshed in a landscape that holds secrets of its own. The series, she believes, favors a kind of expressionism in which the inner lives of the characters explode into the environment.“The darkness around them comes from inside of them,” she said. That’s certainly true of this season, though the earth’s axis may want to have a word. And if López exchanges the first season’s meditation on male toxicity and identity for a consideration of female victimhood and agency, she also returns the series to its roots in cosmic horror, even calling back to the certain Season 1 symbols, like the spiral.Orsi sometimes doubted the wisdom of having handed a marquee franchise to someone with little television experience, but López’s choices and attitude reassured her. “Every step of the way, I was taken aback by how confident she consistently was about what we were asking of her,” Orsi said.That confidence also inspired Foster, who hadn’t done substantive television work since her breakthrough role in the 1976 film “Taxi Driver.”“I read the script and I was like, this is beautiful,” Foster, sitting beside López, said. “There was so much that I was curious about and that I wanted to learn from. Then I met Issa and that really nailed it. I could tell that she had a collaborative spirit.”Before this new season of “True Detective,” Foster hadn’t done substantive television work since her breakthrough role in “Taxi Driver.” “I read the script and I was like, this is beautiful,” she said.The initial episode finds Foster’s Liz Danvers called into investigate the sudden disappearance of the employees of an Arctic research station. (These men are later found naked and frozen into a single block of human ice. Call it a cold case.) The mystery reunites her with Reis’s Evangeline Navarro. Former colleagues, they fell out years ago, in the wake of a gruesome domestic violence case.In the initial drafts, López wrote Navarro as Latina. But after researching the region, López decided that the character should have Native ancestry, specifically Iñupiaq. Foster asked for other changes. She felt that Danvers, a somewhat blinkered white woman whom she nicknamed “Alaska Karen,” should be aged up and that she should cede the story’s center to Navarro.Previous iterations of “True Detective” had depended on at least two major stars. Reis, a former professional boxer who made her acting debut two years ago in the revenge drama “Catch the Fair One,” is a relative newcomer. But no one mistrusted that she could shoulder a series, even as she differs in meaningful ways from Navarro.Reis, who was born and raised in Rhode Island, is of Wampanoag and Cape Verdean descent; Navarro is Iñupiaq and Dominican American. Reis’s language is not Navarro’s language, her ceremonies not the character’s. But they share a single-mindedness, a sense of duty and purpose. So Reis threw herself into research. “I just really want to make sure that I represented Alaska Natives, Iñupiaq people,” said Reis, who sat beside Foster and López in last month’s video interview. (They were all dressed in polite neutrals, though Reis had accessorized her outfit with a fierce-looking choker.) “I didn’t grow up seeing my face on the screen. I wanted to make sure that they could look on the screen and see themselves.”Reis, who is of Wampanoag and Cape Verdean descent, threw herself into researching the cultural background of her character, who is Iñupiaq and Dominican American.Though Navarro is deeply intuitive and alive to the supernatural, Reis was determined that she present as a modern woman and an effective officer, avoiding cliché. “She’s not going to be the token Native,” Reis said.To further that, she met with various Iñupiaq women, as well as several Native state troopers. She quizzed them, respectfully, on what they ate, what they wore, what slang they used. She asked the troopers how they squared their responsibilities to their community with their duties as law enforcement officers.Informed by these conversations, she, Foster and López set about creating what the earlier seasons of “True Detective” hadn’t made space for: women who are as changeable, difficult and complicated as the men.“We’re not really used to seeing women like that,” Foster said.López had done her own research, some online, scouring YouTube and Instagram for videos, some on a visit to Alaska, where she sat with Inuit men and women, ate the caribou and seal they hunted, went snowmobiling with them on the frozen seas. At a local grocery store, she noted the ruinous price of Oreo cookies. That went into the script, too. With the help of Barry Jenkins, an executive producer, the production also brought on Cathy Tagnak Rexford, a native Alaskan who is partly of Iñupiaq descent and Princess Daazhraii Johnson, who identifies as Neets’aii Gwich’in, as producers. As López told it, Rexford and Johnson asked for more scenes of food-making, of laughter, of community. (They could not be reached for comment.)As Alaska lacked the infrastructure to support a six-month shoot, the production had to make do with an area outside of Reykjavik and some computer-generated caribou and polar bears. The shoot was, Foster said, an intimate experience, with the dark and the frigid mitigated by the camaraderie and the beauty of the Northern Lights.Perhaps that beauty softened some of the script’s elements. There is no shortage of existential horror (body horror, too — missing eyeballs, a severed tongue), but the show entertains the possibility of justice and the notion, not entirely foreign to the “True Detective” franchise, that if other people are the source of most suffering, they can also provide comfort.All these months later, cozy on a sofa with her colleagues, López can look back on the experience warmly. “I learned to love the ice and the cold air, and now I miss it,” she said. “I would love to go back there for a vacation. Never to shoot again, though.” More

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      ‘Reacher’: Women Want What He’s Got, and Not Just the Beefcake

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      The hit Amazon series about a bone-crushing crime fighter isn’t only Dad TV. Women dream of having the character’s freedom and abilities, too.You may have felt the tremor: A jacked-up beast of a guy has wandered into TV Land, and his name is Reacher. Season 1 of the Amazon series that bears his name was a monster hit when it dropped in early 2022, and Season 2, which concludes on Jan. 19, appears to be even bigger, becoming Prime Video’s No. 1 title globally on its debut weekend. And the series is crushing it critically the way Reacher crushes a villain’s skull. As of early January, the new season had a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with an 84 percent audience score — when do critics ever rate a brawny action show higher than the audience?Everybody loves this “Reacher.”And by everybody, the reviews seem to suggest, that mostly means every man.A review in Paste Magazine offered this pithy summation: “I’m not saying it’s only for dudes, but I think we’re in safe territory saying it’s mostly for dudes.” And what dudes appear to like is minimal emoting and maximal fisticuffs, delivered by a mountain of muscle — a former Army investigator turned peripatetic crime-solver, who doesn’t waste time wringing his enormous, meaty hands over petty details like having a fixed abode or even a change of clothes.But here’s the thing about “Reacher”: Women watch it, too. Sure, 58 percent of the viewers for Season 1 were male, according to Nielsen. Still, that leaves a rather large number of people who are not. Common wisdom when it comes to Jack Reacher’s popularity is that men want to be him and women want to be with him. But I’ll venture that some women want to be him, too. Or at least, they want some of his freedom.Hatched by the writer Lee Child, Jack Reacher has anchored, since 1997, a series of best-selling novels that have long had a strong female readership — estimated in 2018 by their publisher, Penguin Random House, at around 60 percent. One of their biggest mainstream champions is a woman, the New York Times critic Janet Maslin. I have read about 20 of those novels, mostly in their natural habitats (flights, vacation rentals), and I’m proud to share a fandom with the British writer Antonia Fraser, who in a letter to The Guardian in 2022, wrote, “The thought that there is a new Jack Reacher to read in the evening makes the whole day whiz by happily.”Female readership of the the Reacher novels, started by Lee Child, have been estimated at 60 percent. The first debuted in 1997.The most recent book was written with Child’s brother, Andrew.Now, the Amazon show, starring Alan Ritchson, finally offers a worthy screen adaptation. This is happy news after the two movies from the 2010s, which were derided for casting Tom Cruise as a guy described in one book as having “a six-pack like a cobbled city street, and a chest like a suit of N.F.L. armor, and biceps like basketballs, and subcutaneous fat like a Kleenex tissue.” Not only does Ritchson fit the physical requirements — which are so crucial to the character’s essence that they are not negotiable — but he also has a way with deadpan humor and is as light on his feet as a human the size of an industrial refrigerator can be.Reacher appeals to men in general and fathers in particular because, as the TV critic Eric Deggans of NPR writes, he is “a character freed from all the pressures and responsibilities many dads face every day” — a fairly representative critical assessment, based on the many reviews I’ve read. “He has no wife, steady romantic partner, kids or family,” Deggans continues, “not even a mortgage, rent payment or full-time job.”But I suspect that plenty of moms would welcome the opportunity to be freed from those demands as well. (And they are more likely than dads to be guilt-tripped for even entertaining the fantasy.) Reacher, who travels the country with nothing but a toothbrush, an A.T.M. card and the clothes on his back, does not have any responsibilities other than the ones he sets for himself. I’m not a mother, but I do have a spouse, a deskbound job and bills to pay, and I often find myself thinking, “I’ll have what he’s having.”Some fans were disappointed by the casting of Tom Cruise in two Reacher movie adaptations, given the importance of the character’s size in the books.Karen Ballard/Paramount Pictures and Skydance ProductionsIn the series, as in the books, Reacher (Ritchson, left, with Shaun Sipos and Serinda Swan) must collaborate with other people, forcing him to act more like a human. Brooke Palmer/Amazon Prime VideoConsider the benefits: When Reacher needs a change of clothing, he simply buys something cheap wherever he happens to be. (Miraculously, he always finds his size, which appears to be InfinityXL, in local thrift or surplus stores.) In this season’s first episode, he spends $22 on a new outfit. Effortlessly landing a complete get-up on a two-figure budget is living the dream.His diet is straightforward, too. For breakfast, it is always bacon and eggs. Otherwise, it’s a cheeseburger and fries, and he always scarfs down everything with great relish. Forgive me for thinking this sounds more satisfying, if only for a day, than picking at a “girl dinner” — especially since his eating habits miraculously translate to muscle instead of fat.Maybe the single most enviable thing about Reacher from a woman’s perspective, though, is that he is never afraid. Dark alleyways and menacing strangers don’t faze him, and what woman does not envy that confidence? Often while silently, powerlessly stewing as some jerk harasses a woman in public, I have fantasized about walking up to him and, with just one withering stare, reducing him to a quaking puddle of fear.Reacher can do that. And if that’s not enough, he can punch him into oblivion. For some of us, the transference is real.It is undeniable that Reacher can come close to being a lone sociopath (though he tends to return rather than initiate violence, or at least to strike preemptively). But Child has cannily ensured that while Reacher wanders alone, he rarely operates alone, forcing his hero to act like a human and giving women other vicarious means to connect with him. Season 2 is very much a team story, as Reacher reconvenes with members of his army investigations unit, including Frances Neagley (Maria Sten). Her phobia about being touched might be one reason her relationship with Reacher is successfully platonic; they have the kind of committed friendship you rarely see women have with straight men in books or onscreen, something I find incredibly refreshing.Reacher also is capable of being a thoughtful and attentive lover. In Season 1, he works with two local cops, played by Willa Fitzgerald and Malcolm Goodwin — you’ll have one guess which one he sleeps with. In Season 2, he and his former Army colleague Karla Dixon (Serinda Swan) consummate an attraction that was forbidden back when he was her boss. In both cases, as usual, he respectfully avoids a messy romantic entanglement, all while supplying some much-sought-after action between the sheets.This side of beef has been tenderized for brief but meaningful flings. Believe it or not, a lot of women want those, too.Because of course, there are fans who do, in fact, want to be with Reacher. Fair enough. For them, it’s worth noting that in one novel he is described as being so good in the sack that “The floor quivered. The hall door creaked and shuttered.” I’ll hazard a guess that if anything remotely resembling that scene ever makes it into a future season of “Reacher,” it might well be the rare thing that unites men and women, dads and moms, straight and gay, in a huge burst of happy laughter. More

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      What to Watch This Weekend: Catch Up on ‘The Curse’

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      The second-to-last episode of this cringe dramedy starring Emma Stone, Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie arrives this weekend. There’s still time to watch before the season finale.Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone in a scene from Episode 5 of “The Curse.”Richard Foreman Jr./A24“The Curse,” a nightmare-tinted drama about aspiring HGTV hosts, starring Nathan Fielder, Emma Stone and Benny Safdie, is approaching its finale; the show’s ninth of 10 episodes arrives this weekend: Friday on Paramount+ and Sunday at 9 p.m., on Showtime. The show’s discomfort is so intense it becomes mythical, its white awkwardness so potent that those in its blast zone question reality.The show centers on Whitney (Stone) and Asher (Fielder), a brittle couple trying to sell a show called “Fliplanthropy” under the tortured guidance of Asher’s former bully turned reality producer, Dougie (Safdie, who could repurpose both costume and demeanor to play the disgraced megachurch leader in a recent Hulu documentary). Whitney is the heiress to her parents’ slumlord fortune, a fact she pretends to distance herself from but can’t quite. Asher is her largely dutiful acolyte whose strained encounter with a Black little girl in a parking lot ends with her declaring, “I curse you.”Does your culture believe in curses, Asher asks her father, Abshir (Barkhad Abdi). No, he says. “But if you put an idea in your head, it can become very real.” That’s one of the pillars of the show, this self-imposed reality of imagination. Whitney believes people want her arty, eco-friendly “passive” houses, though no one really does. Asher starts to believe he really is cursed, the rare character to recite Shabbat prayers and also experience backyard stigmata. If you see yourself as a savior, doesn’t everyone look like someone desperate for saving?A lot of art centers on a similar idea, that perception and fate are often the same. Where “The Curse” becomes more interesting is its exploration of the inverse — that when you take an idea out of your head, it can become very surreal. The jokes Asher scripts for himself become, in performance, tortured and grotesque rather than just flat. Whitney thinks her chiropractor could help Abshir with his neck pain, and when put into action, the result is as disturbing as any horror movie. Dougie nudges Whitney to envision the show with a more cynical, Bravo-ish tone, and suddenly a disenchanted cruelty springs forth, like a summoned demon.The line between surrealism and revulsion is often thin, and on “The Curse,” that emerges most often as “recontextualizing” — which the characters themselves discuss as an artistic concept and vaguely mock. But a loss of context is what drives some of the most jarring facets of the show: A heap of poached chicken would be normal and welcome in a packaged meal kit, but sitting on the lip of a sink in a firehouse, that same chicken is terrifying and revolting; Dougie shocks Whitney with how easy it is, with reality TV editing, to turn one fleeting glance into marriage-threatening contempt; the sound of a car horn hangs on too long, until the tone melts into a panicky wail; an expensive stove is an emblem of green living, unless it’s chucked out to the curb as trash, in which case it’s a $7,000 icon of waste.Cringe comedies abound, but the cringe drama is a rarer specimen, perhaps because its discomfort just compounds; scorn does not discharge cringe the way laughter does. On “The Curse” especially, cringe is so intertwined with surveillance and recording, the paranoia that every misstep is on tape forever — which isn’t even paranoia, it’s just reality. But reality for the characters is also warped by reality TV, a phony interaction made “real” by dint of its record, and round and round it goes, every reflection distorted, every interaction a setup. More

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      30 Shows to Watch This Winter

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      This season promises a deluge of big stars (Nicole Kidman, Kate Winslet), intriguing adaptations (“Avatar: The Last Airbender”), long-awaited returns (“True Detective”) and final goodbyes (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”).Is it a delayed effect of the writers’ and actors’ strikes? The Year of the Dragon? Climate change? Whatever the reason, a paper-thin fall season on television screens (definitely a result of the strikes) is being followed by a deluge of attention-grabbing shows this winter. A-list stars (Jodie Foster, Nicole Kidman, Kate Winslet), intriguing adaptations and reboots (“3 Body Problem,” “Avatar: The Last Airbender”), long-awaited returns (welcome back, “True Detective”) and final goodbyes (so long, “Curb Your Enthusiasm”) abound. Throw in all the delayed broadcast-network premieres — your various “Chicago,” “FBI,” “NCIS” and “Law and Order” series, among others — and it promises to be exhausting.Here, based on available screeners, track record or sheer star power, are 30 of the more interesting selections, arranged in chronological order. All dates are subject to change.‘One Piece’Episode 1,089 of the 25-year-old pirate-adventure anime marks the beginning of what is being called its Final Saga, but there’s no telling how many more hundreds of episodes that might entail. (Crunchyroll, Jan. 6)‘Funny Woman’The actress (“Skins”) and writer (“Slow Horses”) Morwenna Banks adapted this six-episode drama from the Nick Hornby novel “Funny Girl.” Gemma Arterton plays a woman who leaves behind her life as a beauty queen in 1960s Blackpool, England, to move to London for a career in TV comedy. (PBS, Jan. 7)‘Miss Scarlet and the Duke’No one is currently doing the self-centered, self-righteous — but charming! — force of nature better than Kate Phillips, now in her fourth season as Eliza Scarlet, who is still struggling to succeed as a female detective in Victorian London. (PBS, Jan. 7)‘Criminal Record’Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo headline this dark London-set police thriller, while Cathy Tyson, star of the great British neo-noir “Mona Lisa,” lends gravitas as the mother of a man who may have been unjustly imprisoned. (Apple TV+, Jan. 10)‘Bluey’Your long parental nightmare is over, at least for a few hours: Everyone’s favorite family of talking Australian dogs drops 10 new episodes. (Disney+, Jan. 12)‘Belgravia: The Next Chapter’Helen Edmundson, chief writer of the quite decent British mystery “Dalgliesh,” takes over Julian Fellowes’s Georgian-Victorian, upstairs-downstairs melodrama “Belgravia.” This second season picks up several decades after the first and centers on the son who caused such consternation in the original, now grown into Lord Trenchard (Benjamin Wainwright). (MGM+, Jan. 14)Jodie Foster, left, and Kali Reis in “True Detective: Night Country,” which takes place in Alaska.Michele K. Short/HBO‘True Detective: Night Country’HBO’s horror noir returns after a five-year hiatus. Season 4 enters the arctic-derangement territory of “Fortitude,” “The Terror” and “The Thing,” as the crew of an Alaska research station collectively disappears into the 24-hour darkness. Jodie Foster plays the series’s latest angsty cop. (HBO, Jan. 14)‘Death and Other Details’Mandy Patinkin stars as the professed “world’s greatest detective” in a shipboard mystery-comedy that appears to triangulate among “Only Murders in the Building,” “White Lotus” and Hercule Poirot. (Hulu, Jan. 16)‘The Shift’The talented Danish director Lone Scherfig (“An Education”) created and is the showrunner of this hospital drama about a team of midwives whose high performance masks critical understaffing; the Danish title translates as “Day and Night.” Sofie Grabol of “The Killing” plays the chief midwife. (MHz Choice, Jan. 16)‘Sort Of’Bilal Baig’s loosely autobiographical, Toronto-set series is known for its head-on but nonchalant approach to gender and identity. It has reached a third season — in which Baig’s character, Sabi, deals with the fallout from their father’s death and their boss’s longings — because it nails the very particular texture of the Canadian dramedy: muted, expertly paced, earnestly whimsical, polished in the most nonaggressive way possible. (Max, Jan. 18)‘The Woman in the Wall’Ruth Wilson brings her layered, off-kilter intensity to this thriller involving an Irish woman who has not recovered from her encounter with one of the country’s notorious Magdalene asylums. Daryl McCormack of “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” plays a cop investigating the murder of a priest. (Paramount+, Jan. 19; Showtime, Jan. 21)‘Griselda’The life of the cocaine merchant Griselda Blanco gets the full-gloss treatment, with a striving-immigrant story line, lots of disco nostalgia and Sofia Vergara in the title role. (Netflix, Jan. 25)‘In the Know’Mike Judge and Zach Woods, who worked together on “Silicon Valley,” bring a similar strain of cerebral satire to the quirks and pretensions of public radio, except this time the unbearable egoists and patient enablers are portrayed by stop-motion puppets. Woods voices an NPR host with an undeniable physical resemblance to Ira Glass; his interview subjects are real people who appear on the animated studio’s monitors. (Peacock, Jan. 25)Brian Tee and Nicole Kidman in “Expats,” based on the Janice Y.K. Lee novel, “The Expatriates.”Prime Video‘Expats’Janice Y.K. Lee’s 2016 novel, “The Expatriates,” about the lives of high-strung Americans living in Hong Kong, comes to TV as a series directed by Lulu Wang (“The Farewell”) and starring Nicole Kidman as the perfect expat wife, Margaret, a bit of casting that feels inevitable. (Amazon Prime Video, Jan. 26)‘Hightown’This engaging beach-town crime drama — energetic but downbeat, in the general neighborhood of “Justified” — enters its third and final season with the highly problematic fisheries agent Jackie Quinones (Monica Raymund) passed out on the Cape Cod sand after her latest blackout bender. (Starz, Jan. 26)‘Masters of the Air’The producing team behind “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific” — including Gary Goetzman, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg — offers another salute to American forces in World War II, this time chronicling the crews of the 100th Bomb Group of the Army Air Force as they fly missions over Germany. Like its predecessors it has a large and not overly well-known cast, led by Austin Butler and Callum Turner. (Apple TV+, Jan. 26)‘Genius: MLK/X’The fourth edition of the “Genius” series yokes together the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and Malcolm X (Aaron Pierre), who crossed paths just once, so expect a lot of scene shifting. (National Geographic, Feb. 1)Maya Erskine and Donald Glover in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” a remake of the 2005 movie.David Lee/Prime Video‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’Determined to keep us guessing, Donald Glover, working with the writer Francesca Sloane, follows up “Atlanta” and “Swarm” with a remake of the 2005 married-spies film that starred Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Glover and Maya Erskine, as John and Jane Smith, lead a promising cast that includes John Turturro, Michaela Coel, Sarah Paulson, Paul Dano, Sharon Horgan and Parker Posey. (Amazon Prime Video, Feb. 2)‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’The most recent season of Larry David’s burlesque of Hollywood self-absorption was a pretty good argument for watching “Family Guy” at 10:30 on Sundays. But with more than two years to prepare for its 12th and final season, maybe the show can recapture some of its former glory. (HBO, Feb. 4)‘Gospel’The indefatigable historian-impresario Henry Louis Gates Jr. follows up the 2021 documentary “The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song” with a four-hour history of gospel music, directed by Stacey L. Holman and Shayla Harris. (PBS, Feb. 12)‘The New Look’Ben Mendelsohn, best known for dark crime dramas and thrillers (“Bloodline,” “The Outsider”) and for playing a shape-shifting alien in the Marvel universe, changes things up. He plays the post-World War II Christian Dior, about to revolutionize the fashion world, in a series from Todd A. Kessler, a creator of “Bloodline” and “Damages.” Juliette Binoche co-stars as Dior’s great competitor Coco Chanel. (Apple TV+, Feb. 14)‘Constellation’Attention Jonathan Banks fans: With “Better Call Saul” kaput, the peerless character actor resurfaces in this science-fiction thriller. Noomi Rapace stars as an astronaut who returns to Earth after a bad trip. (Apple TV+, Feb. 21)Gordon Cormier in “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” a live-action adaptation of the beloved animated series.Robert Falconer/Netflix‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’Netflix turns an animated hit into a live-action show, as it did with the anime “Cowboy Bebop” and “One Piece.” This time it transmutes the highly regarded American series about a young lama-like warrior fighting to bring about harmony among the nations of fire, water, earth and air. (Netflix, Feb. 22)‘The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy’“Grey’s Anatomy” meets “Rick and Morty” in an animated comedy set in an intergalactic hospital in the year 14,002; it is the first show created by Cirocco Dunlap, a writer on “Miracle Workers” and “Man Seeking Woman.” Stephanie Hsu and Keke Palmer voice the young renegade surgeons Sleech and Klak. (Amazon Prime Video, Feb. 23)‘The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live’Andrew Lincoln’s Rick Grimes, the franchise’s original alpha, and Danai Gurira’s sword-wielding Michonne are revived in the seventh “Walking Dead” TV series. (AMC, Feb. 25)‘Shogun’You could ask whose needs are being served by making another miniseries based on James Clavell’s 1975 best seller, beyond those of whomever’s digital pocket the film rights were burning a hole in. (Michaela Clavell, the novelist’s daughter, is an executive producer.) But you can’t argue with the chance to watch excellent Japanese performers like Hiroyuki Sanada, Tadanobu Asano and Fumi Nikaido. (FX, Feb. 27)‘Elsbeth’Elsbeth Tascioni, the aggressively quirky lawyer played by Carrie Preston in “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight,” was a bit of an acquired taste. If you acquired it, Preston is now starring in a spinoff series also created by the generally reliable team of Michelle and Robert King. The premise is clever: Tascioni comes to New York to observe the police department as part of a consent decree (we’re told the other candidate was Cary Agos, the “Good Fight” lawyer played by Matt Czuchry), setting up “Elsbeth” as more of a comic procedural than a legal drama. (CBS, Feb. 29)Kate Winslet plays an autocratic ruler in “The Regime.”Miya Mizuno/HBO‘The Regime’Will Tracy, a writer for “Succession” and “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” cements his connection to HBO with this miniseries he created about the ruler of a fictional, failing Central European autocracy. Among the bonuses of that association: Kate Winslet as your star, Jessica Hobbs (“The Crown”) and Stephen Frears as your directors and Gary Shteyngart as one of your writers. Andrea Riseborough plays the chancellor’s chief minister, Hugh Grant the opposition leader and Martha Plimpton the American secretary of state. (HBO, March 3)‘Palm Royale’Kristen Wiig stars as a woman campaigning to join 1969 Palm Beach society in a cheerfully mordant comedy from the writer and producer Abe Sylvia (“George & Tammy,” “Dead to Me”) that also boasts Allison Janney, Leslie Bibb, Laura Dern and Carol Burnett. (Apple TV+, March 20)‘3 Body Problem’The producers of the blockbuster American fantasy series “Game of Thrones” adapt the blockbuster Chinese science-fiction novel “The Three-Body Problem,” in some kind of apotheosis of the nerd-tech takeover of our storytelling culture. The trailer looks cool, though. (Netflix, March 21)Other returning shows: “The Great North,” Fox, Jan. 7; “All Creatures Great and Small,” PBS, Jan. 7; “La Brea,” NBC, Jan. 9; “SkyMed,” Paramount+, Jan. 11; “The Traitors,” Peacock, Jan. 12; “Family Law,” CW, Jan. 17; “It Was Always Me,” Disney+, Jan. 17; “Chicago Fire,” “Chicago Med,” “Chicago P.D.,” NBC, Jan. 17; “Double Cross,” AllBlk, Jan. 18; “Law & Order,” “Law & Order: Organized Crime,” “Law & Order: SVU,” NBC, Jan. 18; “Real Time With Bill Maher,” HBO, Jan. 19; “The Way Home,” Hallmark, Jan. 21; “The Bachelor,” ABC, Jan. 22; “Father Brown,” BritBox, Jan. 23; “Abbott Elementary,” “The Conners,” “Not Dead Yet,” ABC, Feb. 7; “Halo,” Paramount+, Feb. 8; “Bob Hearts Abishola,” “NCIS,” “NCIS: Hawaii,” “The Neighborhood,” CBS, Feb. 12; “Ghosts,” “So Help Me Todd,” “Young Sheldon,” CBS, Feb. 15; “Blue Bloods,” “Fire Country,” CBS, Feb. 16; “Life and Beth,” Hulu, Feb. 16; “CSI: Vegas,” “The Equalizer,” CBS, Feb. 18; “The Good Doctor,” “Will Trent,” ABC, Feb. 20; “The Tourist,” Netflix, Feb. 29; “BMF,” Starz, March 1; “Alert: Missing Persons Unit,” “The Cleaning Lady,” Fox, March 5; “Animal Control,” Fox, March 6; “Grey’s Anatomy,” ABC, March 14; “Girls5Eva,” Netflix, March 14; “Call the Midwife,” PBS, March 17; “Bridgerton,” Netflix, May 16. More

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      Donald Wildmon, Early Crusader in Conservative Culture Wars, Dies at 85

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      He founded the American Family Association, which became a juggernaut in the Christian right’s campaign against sex and gay themes in art, television and pop culture.Donald E. Wildmon, a conservative activist whose alarm over indecency on television spawned a national organization, the American Family Association, a once powerful cog of the Christian right, and who led boycotts over sexuality and gay themes in some of America’s most popular TV shows and in the arts, died in Tupelo, Miss., where he lived, on Dec 28. He was 85.The cause was Lewy body dementia, according to a statement posted by the American Family Association.Mr. Wildmon’s crusades beginning in the 1970s against boundary-pushing trends in popular culture and the arts — including high-profile attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts — were an early thunderclap of the culture wars that have moved from the fringe of the Republican Party to its mainstream.A former pastor in the United Methodist Church, Mr. Wildmon became a lightning rod for liberals, who attacked him for bigotry and stifling free speech. In 1981, the president of NBC, Fred Silverman, a champion of socially conscious television, said that Mr. Wildmon’s threats to boycott advertisers were “a sneak attack on the foundation of democracy.”“A boycott,” Mr. Wildmon responded in an interview with The New York Times that year, “is as legal and as American as apple pie.”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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      Pat McAfee Apologizes Over Role in Aaron Rodgers-Jimmy Kimmel Feud

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      Rodgers, the Jets quarterback, suggested during an appearance on “The Pat McAfee Show” that Kimmel had a connection to Jeffrey Epstein, leading Kimmel to threaten legal action.Pat McAfee on Wednesday apologized for airing comments that Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers made toward Jimmy Kimmel on McAfee’s ESPN television show a day earlier suggesting the late-night talk show host had a connection to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.“Some things obviously people get very pissed off about, especially when they’re that serious allegations,” McAfee said. “So we apologize for being a part of it. I can’t wait to hear what Aaron has to say about it. Hopefully those two will just be able to settle this, you know, not work-wise, but be able to chitchat and move along.”Speaking on his weekly Tuesday appearance on McAfee’s television show on ESPN, Rodgers, a four-time winner of the N.F.L.’s Most Valuable Player Award, suggested that Kimmel, the host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on ABC, was acquainted with Epstein, who was accused of having sex with minors and in 2019 died by suicide while in jail. Epstein was a longtime friend to powerful politicians and business executives, and the names of some of his associates are expected to be publicly released soon in court documents.“There’s a lot of people, including Jimmy Kimmel, really hoping that doesn’t come out,” Rodgers said on McAfee’s show. Kimmel denied the allegations on X, formerly known as Twitter, and threatened potential legal action against Rodgers.“Your reckless words put my family in danger,” Kimmel said. “Keep it up and we will debate the facts further in court.”ESPN and ABC are owned by Disney, placing McAfee and both entities in an uneasy situation. The predicament highlights the leeway ESPN gives McAfee, including the regular appearances by Rodgers, who has used his time on the show to speak out against vaccines and even challenged Travis Kelce to a debate during a recent appearance. In October, McAfee confirmed a report that Rodgers had been paid over $1 million to appear on the show.Spokesmen for ABC and ESPN did not immediately respond to requests for comment.ESPN signed McAfee, a former N.F.L. punter, to a reported five-year, $85 million contract last year to bring his popular digital show to the network and to appear on other programing. The hire came as ESPN underwent layoffs as part of an overall cost-cutting strategy from Disney.McAfee stands out among the network’s other personalities, often using profanity on what had long been family-friendly programming and eschewing the usual business-casual attire for tank tops. Though he has scaled back on the coarse language, ESPN has hoped his show’s freewheeling format would attract new viewers as the network’s business model changes.“We’re not putting a suit and tie on him,” Burke Magnus, ESPN’s president of content, told The Wall Street Journal in September. 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