‘Celebrity Beef,’ Farewell to ‘Tom Swift,’ the Hillside Strangler Saga, Interview with the Vampires

Celebrity Beef

Joel McHale must have had a good time when he guested on the premiere episode of truTV’s comedic cooking show Fast Foodies. The actor/comedian returns to his The Soup stomping grounds to host and judge a new celebrity cooking contest, spiced with humor, that pits two stars head-to-head in a kitchen rivalry. The winner of each challenge gets an advantage in the next round while the loser gets punished (example: swapping cooking implements with gardening tools). The winner gets $10,000 to donate to a favorite charity. In the opener, Curb Your Enthusiasm star Cheryl Hines takes on Lucifer’s Rachael Harris, and a devilish good time is had by all.

Tom Swift

Tom, we hardly knew ya. But with The CW on the block, the axe is falling more quickly on the network’s marginally performing shows, and so the Nancy Drew spinoff ends its run after just one season. The finale is jam-packed, with Tom (Tian Richards) prepping a drone launch to save his tech-pioneer dad from space. Setbacks include a cyberattack at his family’s Swift Enterprises’ Black engineering conference, and a revelation about Papa Swift’s past that forces the young inventor to question his past and his future.

The Hillside Strangler: Devil in Disguise

A four-part true-crime docuseries takes a psychological approach in revisiting the 1970s murder spree of serial-killer cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono. Devil in Disguise studies analysis tapes and audio recordings in its focus on the mental state of Bianchi, who claimed during his confessions that he suffered from multiple personality disorder. Was he a con artist or a madman coerced to confess

What We Do in the Shadows

Growing pains are especially troublesome when you’re dealing with a mutant offspring like Baby Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch)—who’s no longer a baby, but an unholy terror of an old-soul adolescent who’s wreaking havoc in the vampire family’s ramshackle Staten Island lair in this hilarious supernatural comedy. Though father figure Laszlo (Matt Berry) insists, “He’s all boy,” the ghouls decide it would be in Colin’s best interest to be educated among the elites in a private school. But how to impress the headmaster when he arrives for an interview? The madness that follows their attempt to address the simple question “Who exactly are the parents?” is wild fun even by this show’s high standards. No wonder an Impractical Joker feels compelled to get in on the act.

Only Murders in the Building

We’re nearing the end of the mystery-comedy’s second season, and it’s time for Mabel (the underrated Selena Gomez) to do some soul-searching, which involves memory flashbacks from her childhood solving puzzles with her late dad (Mark Consuelos). The puzzle currently consuming her is whether she is indeed capable of stabbing someone, which involves a trip to Coney Island with an unexpected new friend and a climactic epiphany. Matters are lighter back at the Arconia, where Oliver’s (Martin Short) latest antics earn this rebuke: “I love cringe comedy, but this is painful.” Painfully funny.

Inside Tuesday TV:

• America’s Got Talent (8/7c, NBC): The auditions come to an end, and the judges make their final call about who’s moving on to the live shows next week.
• All Rise (8/7c, OWN): Busy times for the D.A.’s office in this legal drama: While Mark (Wilson Bethel) goes up against the federal government, colleagues Luke (J. Alex Brinson) and Teddy (Ronak Gandhi) end up on opposite sides of a sexual assault case in Lola’s (Simone Missick) courtroom.
• Edge of the Earth (9/8c, HBO): In the finale of the visually stunning action-adventure docuseries, surfers Ian and Grant “Twiggy” Baker head to South Africa’s remote West Coast to catch previously unridden big waves. Their quest into “The Great Unknown” is captured in aerial photography and immersive video.
• Frontline (10/9c, PBS, check local listings at pbs.org): The timely documentary Ukraine: Life Under Russia’s Attack goes inside the Russian assault on Kharkiv with first-person accounts from displaced families who go underground to survive and the first responders risking their lives to save others in Ukraine’s second largest city.