The day after the Emmys is the traditional start of the new TV season, and here’s what we have to show for it in a pandemic year.
The one new show to speak about is “Filthy Rich” (Fox, 9 p.m.), which was to have started airing in the spring but was saved to the fall just in case production halted during the lockdown, and boy did it ever. It seems an amiable enough soap about at the matriarch of a religious televangelist empire (not unlike “The Righteous Gemstones”) who tries to keep the enterprise going despite illegitimate children popping up to make their claim. It’s Kim Cattrell’s biggest role on network TV and she knows the precise degree of brassiness to play.
Two other “new” fall network shows might be familiar to some from cable. One is a cop show that as made for the Spectrum cable subscribers last year, “L.A.’s Finest” (Fox, 8 p.m.), a spin-off from the “Bad Boys” movie franchise starring Gabrielle Union and Jessica Alba. Spectrum held up season two in light of police violence over the summer, but dropped the lot of it two weeks ago (and perhaps it too will come to network TV should the pandemic linger).
“Manhunt: Deadly Games” (CBS, 8 p.m.) also comes from Spectrum, telling the story of Richard Jewell and the Olympic bombing of 1996. Its cast includes Judith Light (in the mother role Kathy Bates had in last year’s Clint Eastwood movie “Richard Jewell”), Carla Gugino, Jack Huston and Cameron Britton. It’s the second installment of the “Manhunter” anthology; the first, about the Unabomber, ran on Discovery.
The life of a 10-year-old Aboriginal boy is chronicled in “In My Blood It Runs,” making its debut on “POV” (PBS, 10 p.m., check local listings).
The shooting death of a 15-year old Black girl, Latasha Harlins, in 1992 is the subject of the film “A Love Song for Latasha” (Netflix, streaming).