‘Dancing with the Stars’ Back on ABC, ‘Talent’ Finals, ‘Real Sports,’ Putin vs. the Press

Dancing With the Stars

Barring the sort of last-minute postponement that was threatened before the WGA reached a tentative agreement over the weekend with studios and producers, the dancing competition will launch its 32th season with a supersized (two and a half hours) premiere, introducing past Mirrorball winner Julianne Hough as co-host with her fellow celebrity champion Alfonso Ribeiro, thus ending the lamentable Tyra Banks era. The cast is the usual mixed bag of actors (from Oscar winner Mira Sorvino to Brady Bunch alum Barry Williams), reality stars (yes, The Bachelorette) and stars from music (Jason Mraz) and sports (Adrian Peterson). In a rare reversal, the series returns to network TV after last season’s streaming-only experiment, with a live-streaming simulcast on Disney+ and episodes available for streaming the next day on Hulu.

America’s Got Talent

It’s a collision of the reality titans, as the summer hit finishes its run with the top 11 acts vying for America’s vote in hopes of winning the $1 million prize. The 82nd Airborne Chorus and head-balancing duo The Ramadhani Brothers were the Top 2 going into the final stretch, joined by another choir, three dance crews, two singers, a magician, a stand-up comic and a dog act. They’ll give it their all one last time before the results are announced in the Wednesday finale.

 

Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel

With the recent announcement that this acclaimed sports news program is in its final season, it’s worth celebrating Real Sports’ choice of stories, always an intriguing blend of investigation and feature. This month’s roster features a heartwarming profile of RJ Peete, who at 25 has become one of the most beloved members of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ staff. Diagnosed at 3 with autism, the son of famous parents (former NFL star Rodney Peete and actress Holly Robinson Peete) has pursued his dream and is now a valued attendant in the team’s clubhouse. Other segments include a report on the pressures of being an NFL kicker and an investigation into elite colleges that are favoring athletes over top students in the admissions process.

Welcome to Wrexham

Not exactly sports journalism, but highly entertaining, the docuseries about the Welsh soccer team bought by Hollywood’s Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney offers two back-to-back vignettes. The first is a whimsical account of how the vacation of the team’s respected advisor Shaun Harvey is almost ruined by McElhenney’s unexpected visit to Wrexham, with pranks and stunts creating unnecessary chaos. The second episode drills down on the team’s chronic runner-up status, with the Red Dragons adopting a “winning mentality” in their goal to be promoted. (In an amusing aside, longtime Daytime Emmy loser Susan Lucci offers perspective as someone who kept plugging away until finally winning the prize.)

Frontline

Russian journalists who report on their nation’s invasion of Ukraine as an act of war risk being sentenced to 15 years in prison. A timely edition of Frontline explores Russian president Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on censoring free speech and media, with more than 300 journalists banned and branded “foreign agents” since the invasion. This includes Nobel Prize winner Dmitry Muratov, whose struggle to keep his newspaper alive while protecting his reporters is the focus of this report. “If we give up on democracy, we say yes to war,” Muratov says.

INSIDE TUESDAY TV:

• Savior Complex (9/8c, HBO): A three-part docuseries (concluding Wednesday) concerns Renee Bach, a young American missionary who founded a medical clinic for malnourished children in Uganda in 2010 but is accused by a whistleblower of treating the sick children herself without a medical degree. Is she doing God’s work, or is she an “angel of death” who succumbed to a “white savior” complex?
• The Swarm (9/8c, The CW): The slow-burning and disjointed ecological thriller zigs from Vancouver Island to Europe to the South China Sea, investigating bizarre marine behavior in whales, mussels and jellyfish, all while a deadly new strain of mutated bacterium begins infecting people on land.
• Only Murders in the Building (streaming on Hulu): In Season 3’s penultimate episode of the mystery-comedy, with Loretta (Meryl Streep) arrested but no one satisfied with this turn of events, the trio of amateur sleuths recreates the final moments of Ben’s (Paul Rudd) life in hopes of smoking out the actual killer-or killers.
• 72 Seconds in Rittenhouse Square (streaming on Paramount+): A three-part docuseries uses never-seen cellphone video footage to try to shed new light on the fatal 2018 encounter of real-estate developer Sean Schellenger and food-delivery courier Michael White in downtown Philadelphia that ended with Schellenger fatally stabbed and White charged with voluntary manslaughter. Was it self-defense in a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or was there more to it?