HBO Max, 3:00 a.m. ET
DOCUMENTARY MINISERIES PREMIERE: Back in May, Amy Schumer made a TV show, squirreled away in her family farmhouse with her chef husband Chris Fischer. It was refreshingly low-key, filmed by a few static cameras and by their nanny/assistant, who operated the one handheld camera, usually while the couple’s son, Gene, is napping). That was the Food Network’s Amy Schumer Learns to Cook, a charming little cooking show that recently was renewed for a second season. Before that, and before the pandemic, Schumer starred in a Netflix standup special – and before that, Schumer learned she was pregnant (with the same baby Gene who subsequently slept through most of Learns to Cook), and decided to document the experience. The result, a three-part miniseries documentary called Expecting Amy, premieres today on HBO Max, and serves as an unofficial prequel to both the standup special and the sequestered cooking show. It shows Schumer getting and processing the news of the pregnancy, dealing with morning sickness (and sickness at other times of the day) while writing and performing her standup act, and approaching motherhood. And you thought, in Amy Schumer Learns to Cook, that that TV show was built around what Amy Schumer had in the oven…
TCM, 10:00 p.m. ET
Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman directed this film in 1957, and its unforgettable, almost instantly iconic plot and images – about a medieval knight who plays chess with Death – did as much as Italy’s Federico Fellini to launch the international arthouse cinema movement. Woody Allen had great fun making fun of The Seventh Seal in Love and Death and elsewhere, but adored Bergman and the film. It’s always worth a look, and even more so right now, because, in this movie, Death is wandering around, and quite busy, because the world is in the midst of a deadly bubonic plague.
The Movie Channel, 10:05 p.m. ET
Another beautifully photographed film, this 1978 movie also features a plague – of locusts. It’s set on a Texas farm shortly before WWI, and is the second feature film directed by Terrence Malick, who had made the impeccably paced Badlands five years before. Days Of Heaven also marks the first major starring role by Richard Gere, and features a beautiful score by the late Ennio Morricone, who died Monday at age 91. The beautiful images were captured by the great cinematographer Nestor Almendros.