Photo: Craig Sjodin/ABC
Here’s what’s happening in the world of television for Monday, January 11. All times are Eastern.
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The Bachelor (ABC, 8 p.m., 25th-season premiere): Last week, our reviewer Gwen Ihnat was pleasantly surprised when she dropped in on the 25th
Bachelor premiere; after a string of bland leads, it looks like the franchise has found a winner with the first Black Bachelor, Matt James: “Part of his appeal that can be traced to the fact that Matt is a Bachelor Nation newbie: never appeared on
Photo: Craig Sjodin/ABC
This season of
The Bachelorette has been deeply, often uncomfortably, weird. Most of this is for an obvious reason the COVID-birthed safety precautions that eliminated most of the scenery, date possibilities, and interactions that normally lend color and drama to the series but some of it was also badly engineered bullshit on the part of the show. Shoving the first older bachelorette (poor, maligned Clare Crawley) out of the spotlight as quickly as humanly possible was a bad look for
The Bachelorette, and made the producers and creative team behind the reality program look like way bigger assholes than usual. So while the younger, admittedly more telegenic Tayshia Adams was a charming and interesting replacement, the bad taste had already been left in viewers’ mouths, knowing they couldn’t trust the show any farther than Clare could throw it.
Decades after
The Terminator, it’s more believable than ever that tech companies will someday send us hurtling toward the apocalypse. In real life, that’s happening because they let elections get stolen, but Fox’s
Next the latest in a long line of fiction about how cell phones are actually scary suggests that it’s not the skull-stomping Terminators we need to be afraid of, but SkyNet itself. Or, as it’s called here, “neXt.” John Slattery stars as the head of a big tech company who has lost faith (so to speak) in technology, making him the perfect person to assist the FBI’s Cyber Crime Task Force. After all, if anyone knows tech and the evil it’s capable of, it’s a guy who helped program it to do those evils. That’s all pretty straightforward TV procedural fare, but there is a bonus hook here: Slattery’s character sees stuff that isn’t there and has a tendency to smash computers with a hammer because he’s so afraid of them. So maybe he’s not the perfe
Photo: Will Robson-Scott/Amazon Studios
Here’s what’s happening in the world of television for Friday, December 11, and Saturday, December 12. All times are Eastern.
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Small Axe: Alex Wheatle (Amazon, Friday, 3:01 a.m.): “A short coming-of-age film that works well within the Small Axe saga,
Alex Wheatle has a richness comparable to any long, drawn-out biopic that’s come from Hollywood of late, thanks to the nuances McQueen layers into the story. The audience watches Alex as he eagerly shoves fried chicken and rice into his mouth on Christmas morning, after being treated like just another member of Dennis’ family. From the barbershop to the street corners, Alex’s induction into Black culture is swift and sharp, but as a master of survival, he is eager to learn his way.” Read the rest of Aramide Tinubu’s review of the second-to-last installment of Steve McQueen’s anthology here.