Ricky Gervais Laughs at Mortality, True Crime on Netflix and ID, Animal Shenanigans on TCM

Ricky Gervais: Mortality

It’s coming for us all, but it takes a fearless comic personality like Ricky Gervais to joke about death and mortality. “I think this is my most honest and confessional show so far,” he tells an audience at the London Palladium. This is his fourth stand-up comedy special for the streamer, where you can also find his exceptional original comedy series After Life.

Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story

Every true-crime outlet has shown fascination in the sordid story of the licensed Utah therapist Jodi Hildebrandt, who, with YouTube parenting influencer Ruby Franke, was arrested in 2023 on charges of child abuse after Franke’s 12-year-old son escaped Hildebrandt’s house through a window and ran to a neighbor for help. Franke’s 10-year-old daughter was also found restrained and malnourished in the house, prompting an investigation, arrest, and trial that shocked those who had trusted these women. Filmmaker Skye Borgman explores how Hildebrandt weaponized her power and control to such awful ends.

American Monster

Another chilling case brings the 13th season of the true-crime docuseries to an end. This episode focuses on the 2015 shooting murders in Cleveland, Ohio, of Jenea Harvison, the 29-year-old CEO of a daycare center chain she founded, and her younger brother Darnell. They were killed in a parking lot by Jenea’s estranged husband, Roy, who had harbored dreams of football stardom while Jenea’s career took off.

Flipper

Animal lovers will adore the movie channel’s daytime lineup, devoted to movies about a variety of animals with special bonds to their human counterparts. The most famous of this lot is undoubtedly the Florida dolphin Flipper, introduced in a 1963 movie (airing at 10:30 am/9:30c) that inspired a series on NBC (1964-67), which was revived on TV in the 1990s and in another separate film version in 1996. Chuck Conners and Luke Halpin star as a fisherman and his son who encounter the wounded dolphin in the Florida Keys. Followed by 1964’s Flipper’s Big Adventure (12:15/11:15c), with Brian Kelly replacing Conners as he would in the TV series the same year.

TCM’s animal cavalcade opens with 1954’s Gypsy Colt (7:15 am/6:15c) and features numerous vintage documentary shorts, the 1965 comedy Zebra in the Kitchen (2 pm/1c) starring TV’s Dennis the Menace Jay North, and the Africa-set 1965 film Clarence, the Cross-Eyed Lion (4 pm/3c), which inspired the 1966-69 series Daktari. The lineup concludes with a true classic: the Oscar-winning 1946 The Yearling (5:45/4:45c), featuring Claude Jarman Jr., who earned a special Juvenile Oscar as the boy who bonds with a pet faun.

Baylen Out Loud

In the Season 2 finale of the reality show about Baylen Dupree, who lives with Tourette’s syndrome, Baylen gets a possible reprieve from the tics that have followed her throughout London when she gains access to a device that could reduce her outbursts and give her a new lease on life. This development causes her and fiancé Colin Dooley to rethink their future.