Category Archives: Winter Press Tour 2018

What might have been another dreary detective chasing serial killer series is turned on its head when women portray both roles, exploring the kinds of things that aren’t often considered in such dramas. In the stylish new “Killing Eve” (BBC America, 8 p.m.), the versatile Sandra Oh plays a frazzled, half-American desk jockey at Mi-5 [...]

You may be seeing double in the return of “Trading Spaces” (TLC, 8 p.m.), the granddaddy of the home improvement shows, returning tonight a decade after it went off the air. Not only has the cast roughly doubled to 16 (while still including old favorites like Paige Davis, Ty Pennington, Vern Yip and  Frank Bielec), but [...]

Until she became a heroine of the inaugural “American Crime Story”, the former Los Angeles prosecutor Marcia Clark had been keeping a basement-deep low profile. But the sympathetic portrayal of her thankless work in the unsuccessful case against O.J. Simpson in an Emmy-winning performance by Sarah Paulson, brought her back into the limelight. She met [...]

When Lois Vossen, executive producer of “Independent Lens” (9 p.m., PBS, check local listings) was growing up in Minnesota, she had a direct connection to the subject of tonight’s film, but didn’t know it. “Fifty years ago I stopped eating grapes to support a boycott thousands of miles away.”  Vossen told reporters earlier this year. [...]

A funeral was the spark of Judd Apatow’s big two-night, four-hour documentary on his comic mentor “The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling” (HBO, 10 p.m.). And if Shandling was still around, he’d get the self-deprecating humor in that. After Shandling died suddenly at 66 a year ago of a blood clot, Apatow quickly put together [...]

NBC’s new prestige show “Rise” (NBC, 10 p.m.), about the establishment of a musical theater program in a rural Pennsylvania high school, may remind some of a rural “Glee,” but it’s also grounded in the midwest ethos of a previous show by one of its executive producers, Jason Katims, “Friday Night Lights.” “What I love [...]

In its incessant promos, the rebooted American Idol has already indicated which direction it will be going, when it returns tonight after a two year absence on a new network, ABC. It’s all those back stories about singers doing it for their family, or taking their last shot, or telling their grandma they’re going to [...]

Sir Richard Attenborough usually gets closer to his subject matter than he is able to in “Planet Earth: Blue Planet II” (BBC America, 9 p.m.). Concentrating on the 3/4 of the planet that is ocean, it finds a lot of sea creatures so obscure you might think they may be making it up after a [...]