Worth Watching: ‘Bosch’ is Back, ‘Ramy’ on Hulu, ‘Last Man’ Hits 150, Classic ‘Lucy’ Episodes
A selective critical checklist of notable Friday TV:
Bosch (streaming on Amazon Prime Video): One of Amazon’s signature series, the terrifically gritty crime drama based on Michael Connelly’s best-sellers, is back for a fifth season. And unlike past years, which have reached back into the archive to adapt some of the earlier Harry Bosch novels, this season is more current and topical, tackling 2017’s Two Kinds of Truth, in which Harry (the expert Titus Welliver) goes undercover to expose an opioid ring after the murder of a pharmacist. Complicating his mission: charges that he may have tampered with evidence in an old death-row case.
Ramy (streaming on Hulu): “I want to figure out my calling,” says Ramy Hassan (creator/star Ramy Youssef) early on in this frank, funny and bracingly authentic comedy series about a young first-generation Egyptian-American Muslim coming of millennial age in urban North Jersey. Ramy is serious about his faith, but trying to forge his own future in a modern society while living up to his family’s expectations about love and career is easier said than done.
Last Man Standing (8/7c, Fox): Guest star Melissa Peterman (Reba) brings some pep to the sitcom’s milestone 150th episode as a feisty sales rep who inspires Mandy (Molly McCook) in her desire to get her clothing-design business off the ground — even if it means training her vision on the prosaic duds in Mike’s (Tim Allen) Outdoor Man store. While Mike insists the principles of business never change, wife Vanessa (the invaluable Nancy Travis) advises Mandy: “Go with your father into the past. He’s comfortable there.” As are we all.
I Love Lucy Funny Money Special (8/7c, CBS): Speaking of the past, CBS doubles down on nostalgia with its latest special resurrecting classic I Love Lucy episodes in colorized form. The episodes, both from 1954, share a theme of money. In the first, Lucy (Lucille Ball) and Ethel (Vivian Vance) get more than they bargained for when they market and bottle Lucy’s homemade salad dressing. (It’s not vitameatavegamin, but it’ll do.) In the second, the Ricardos and Mertzes go to farcical extremes to retrieve a dollar bill worth $300 in a newspaper contest. Whether in color or black and white, this series is timeless.
Inside Friday TV: Original Netflix highlights include the female buddy-comedy movie Someone Great, starring Jane the Virgin‘s Gina Rodriguez as a music journalist who goes on one last girls’ night out in New York City with her BFFs (She’s Gotta Have It’s DeWanda Wise and American Dreams’s Brittany Snow) before moving cross country. Also: the mockumentary Lunatics, starring and written by Chris Lilley (Summer Heights High), who as usual plays a variety of outrageously unpredictable characters… PBS’s American Masters pays homage to a master photographer who turned a “snapshot aesthetic” of street images into high art in Garry Winograd: All Things Are Photographable (9/8c, check local listings at pbs.org). His most famous photo is Marilyn Monroe’s billowing white dress on the set of The Seven Year Itch, but his legacy of 10,000 rolls of film provides a visual history of American from the 1950s to the early ’80s… A “special report” of HBO’s Vice: The Nature of Work (10/9c) explores how advances in automation and artificial intelligence are changing the workplace. In other words: Robots are coming after your jobs.
