Worth Watching: CW’s ‘100’ Returns, Domestic Scrimmage on ‘black-ish,’ ‘Fosse/Verdon’
A selective critical checklist of notable Tuesday TV:
The 100 (9/8c, The CW): Hello, Sanctum! Now entering its sixth season, the grueling YA apocalyptic sci-fi saga returns with Clarke (Eliza Taylor) and her fellow survivors jumping 125 years into the future‑though they still look like millennials — and arriving on a planet that has the feeling of a utopia. If you know The 100, you know that warm fuzzies usually hide harsher realities, so watch your step, kids.
black-ish (9/8c, ABC): Once again, the family sitcom tackles a relevant issue — not race this time, but the enduring all-American sport of football. When middle-schooler Jack (Miles Brown) makes the football team, Dre (Anthony Anderson) couldn’t be prouder. But mother Bow (Tracee Ellis Ross), being a doctor, couldn’t be more worried about the gridiron risks of the contact sport. Let the debate begin, and in the meantime, maybe Jack could sharpen his badminton skills?
Fosse/Verdon (10/9c, FX): Another audacious episode of the dazzling biographical show-biz drama finds Gwen Verdon (Michelle Williams) in a career and personal tailspin just as her estranged husband Bob Fosse (Sam Rockwell) hits a personal best, winning an Oscar, Tonys and Emmys in the same year. But is he happy? Not Fosse, driven by demons of self-doubt and more of a #MeToo train wreck than ever in his treatment of Gwen and the chorines in his latest musical. In a surreal climax, a Pippin medley performed by Fosse’s nearest and dearest haunts the troubled director/choreographer as he mentally spirals. What non-Broadway babies will make of this is anyone’s guess, but it definitely takes a swing.
The Real (Documentary) World: HBO’s six-part docu-series On Tour with Asperger’s Are Us (8/7c), airing with weekly back-to-back episodes, follows a troupe of sketch comics on the autism spectrum on their first cross-country tour in a rickety RV. First stops: Boston and New York City… ESPN’s acclaimed 30 for 30 sports documentary series continues with The Dominican Dream (9/8c), profiling the rise, fall and redemption of Felipe Lopez, son of Dominican immigrants who as a high-school basketball star was touted as the next Michael Jordan… PBS’s Frontline presents The Last Survivors (10/9c, check local listings at pbs.org), featuring interviews with some of the last remaining survivors of the Holocaust, who were children at the time and reflect on growing up with psychological scars and crises of faith while reconciling their grief… A&E’s new eight-part docu-series Kids Behind Bars: Life or Parole (10/9c) profiles eight men serving life without parole for crimes committed as teens and who are now seeking resentencing after Supreme Court rulings protecting juvenile offenders. Each episode explores a prisoner’s case, while interviewing victims’ families and friends, law enforcement, reporters and psychologists as well as the convicted offender… ABC’s 1969 series (10/9c) explores the infamous Charles Manson murders, interviewing “family” members and “Manson girls” Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Dianne Lake.
Inside Tuesday TV: Anthony Jeselnik, known for crushing societal taboos in his stand-up comedy, gets his second Netflix special, Anthony Jeselnik: Fire in the Maternity Ward… Also streaming: a fifth season of gritty mystery Shetland on BritBox, starring Douglas Henshall as Scottish detective Jimmy Perez, who follows the discovery of body parts into a case of human trafficking… There’s a crisis of conscience for Special Agent OA (Zeeko Zaki) on CBS’s FBI (9/8c), who must put personal opinions and politics aside when he’s assigned to provide security for a controversial Egyptian leader… More struggles for Dr. Max (Ryan Eggold) on NBC’s New Amsterdam (10/9c) when his cancer fails to respond to chemo or radiation. But that still doesn’t stop him from challenging Dr. Reynolds (Jocko Sims) in assessing what went wrong in a recent surgery.
