‘Dietland’ Finale & Paramount Network Remembers Trayvon Martin
A critical checklist of notable Monday TV:
Dietland (9/8c, AMC): This messy but engrossing feminist parable could probably stand to shed a few subplots, as the first season jolts to an inconclusive finale. Plum (the terrific Joy Nash) becomes more immersed in the underground world of the Jennifer activist/terrorist group, comprised mostly of survivors of sexual violence. (Orange Is the New Black‘s Selenis Leyva is especially strong as founding member Soledad.) After a season of personal humiliations and setbacks, Plum asserts, “I’m doing the kicking now.” But how far will she go to fight back? Also doing her fair share of more cold-hearted kicking in designer footware is Plum’s former boss Kitty (icy Julianna Margulies), ascendant in the corporate suite as she celebrates her coup with a purge. If only she knew what was happening many floors below in the fashion closet, where Julia (Tamara Tunie) and a broken Leeta (Erin Darke) are in hiding. As usual, the tone is all over the place, from broad satire to impassioned social allegory. But there’s no show quite like it, so now we wait to see if AMC orders a second chapter.
Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story (10/9c, Paramount Network): A six-part documentary series from Jay-Z and the producing team behind the Peabody-winning Time: The Kalief Browder Story revisits the tragedy of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed African-American teen fatally shot in 2012 by community watch volunteer George Zimmerman. His acquittal on self-defense grounds, using Florida’s controversial “Stand Your Ground” law, sparked an outrising and helped establish the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
Whose Streets? (10/9c, PBS, check local listings at pbs.org): The latest from the POV documentary series revisits the fallout from another police shooting of an unarmed African-American teenager: Michael Brown, whose death in 2014 led to the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri.
Inside Monday TV: As part of the seasonal rite of debasement, Becca faces the suitors she dumped on a two-hour edition of ABC’s The Bachelorette: The Men Tell All (8/7c). Expect bloopers and a preview of the new season of Bachelor in Paradise… Watson (Lucy Liu) hits a snag in her adoption process on CBS’s Elementary (10/9c), and the case-of-the-week gets complicated when she and Sherlock (Jonny Lee Miller) learn the victim had a secret life as a contract killer… Animal activist Lek Chailert, who has operated an elephant refuge in Thailand since 1996, is the focus of the Starz documentary Love & Bananas (9/8c). The film recounts her efforts to rescue a 70-year-old pachyderm, Noi Na, and give the captive creature a chance to live out its final years in a peaceful, natural setting.
