SATURDAY
AUGUST 15
2020

BIANCULLI’S BEST BETS

 

Amazon Prime Video, 3:00 a.m. ET

SERIES PREMIERE: All six installments of this stage comedy series from BBC One are imported today by Amazon, and their overall cleverness and wittiness should impress you. It comes from the Mischief comedy troupe, the same folks that concocted and starred in the West End and Broadway comedy hit The Play That Goes Wrong. And this TV variant presents six “plays,” each in a different genre, purportedly performed by the Cornley Dramatic Society in front of a live audience. The audience is real, but the plays are gloriously skewed – as are the performances, the sets, and everything else that happens in The Goes Wrong Show. I suggest skipping the Christmas play at the start and jumping straight to the WWII spoof in episode two. And don’t miss the episode six Tennessee Williams spoof, which manages to get extended belly laughs out of a gravity-defying set (pictured) that owes its inspiration to Ernie Kovacs. These are such original outings, I’m already hungry for more. And Amazon could deliver them, because BBC One and Mischief also collaborated on a couple of Goes Wrong specials – including 2017’s A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong, starring Diana Rigg and Derek Jacobi. I need to see that immediately, please. And Peter Pan Goes Wrong, from 2016, too.
 
  
 
 

AXS TV, 4:40 p.m. ET

It’s been 15 years since Martin Scorsese directed his six-hour, two-part artistic biography of Bob Dylan for PBS’s American Masters. It’s an amazing documentary, in depth more than scope – it covers only the years 1961 to 1966, which works out to about one year per hour. But what electrifying years they were… in more ways than one. And AXS repeats the entire documentary today in one place, bringing it all back home.
 
  
 
 

HBO, 8:00 p.m. ET

I first noticed Margot Robbie when she co-starred as Christina Ricci’s sister in ABC’s 2011 period drama Pan Am. Two years later, everyone noticed her as Robbie had an attention-getting featured role, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, in The Wolf of Wall Street. And since then, she’s played movie roles as diverse as Tonya Harding in I, Tonya and Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. But throughout, she’s taken time out to play DC Comics character Harley Quinn, a role she first portrayed when providing Harley’s voice for a Family Guy videogame in 2014. On screen, she introduced her version of the Joker’s unhinged former girlfriend in 2016’s Suicide Squad – and was rewarded with her own spinoff starring vehicle earlier this year, which premieres on HBO tonight. And it’s excellent timing, because Birds of Prey also showcases Harley’s female partners in crime, who include The Huntress and Black Canary. The Huntress is played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who played Nikki in the 2017 season of FX’s Fargo, and Black Canary is played by Jurnee Smollett, whose TV credits include Friday Night Lights, Parenthood, and True Blood. And tomorrow, Smollett stars in HBO’s newest big-splash miniseries, Lovecraft Country. So there’s an awful lot of talent at the center of this particular comic-book movie – and a lot of attitude, too.
 
  
 
 

TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET

This 1951 musical is tonight’s selection as one of “The Essentials,” as chosen by guest co-host Brad Bird – whose taste, this season, has been impeccable. And tonight, there’s the amazing extended ballet ending to An American in Paris, one of the high watermarks of movie musical history. Gene Kelly stars – and in that finale, gets to embody one classic painting after another, and not only bring them to life, but bring them to dance.
 
  
 
 
 
 
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2688 Comments
 
 
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David Bianculli

Founder / Editor

David Bianculli has been a TV critic since 1975, including a 14-year stint at the New York Daily News, and sees no reason to stop now. Currently, he's TV critic for NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and is an occasional substitute host for that show. He's also an author and teaches TV and film history at New Jersey's Rowan University. His 2009 Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of 'The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour', has been purchased for film rights. His latest, The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific, is an effusive guidebook that plots the path from the 1950s’ Golden Age to today’s era of quality TV.