Worth Watching: ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ Docks for Good, Amazon’s ‘Hunters,’ ‘Clone Wars’ on Disney+
A selective critical checklist of notable Friday TV:
Fresh Off the Boat (8/7c, ABC): After six years, the groundbreaking comedy about a Taiwanese-American family ends its run with back-to-back episodes. The first is predictably nostalgic, when the family van “Sheila” breaks down as the Huangs head to their first visit to Disney World (surprisingly for an ABC series set in Orlando). As Louis (Randall Park) and Jessica (Constance Wu) react differently to the loss of the family vehicle, Eddie (Hudson Yang) plots a road trip back to Washington, D.C. to unearth a time capsule. Series star Park directs the series finale, appropriately titled “Commencement,” during which Eddie must shatter his overbearing mother’s dreams of Harvard by telling her he wants to attend culinary school. Visions of the future for this memorable family commence.
Gentified (streaming on Netflix): As Boat sails away, a new comedy about cultural assimilation and identity premieres. America Ferrera is an executive producer of the 10-episode dramedy about three Mexican-American cousins living in East L.A. whose pursuit of the so-called American dream finds them at odds with their cultural heritage.
Hunters (streaming on Amazon Prime Video): Revenge is a dish served piping hot, and bloody, in a pulp thriller starring Al Pacino as Holocaust survivor Meyer Offerman, who leads an eclectic team of Nazi hunters in 1977 — other members include an ex-spy nun, a washed-up actor and a blaxploitation vixen. Their mission: to expose, and often execute, Nazis who are plotting a Fourth Reich while living in plain sight in the U.S. with new identities, often supplied by our very government. Never forget! (See the full review.)
Star Wars: The Clone Wars (streaming on Disney+): The animated spinoff of the pop-culture phenom enters its final season with Captain Rex finding new allies in the experimental Clone Force 99, aka “The Bad Batch.” They’ll go behind enemy lines to investigate recent victories of the Separatists, who Rex believes are using stolen data to predict the Grand Army’s next moves.
Inside Friday TV: Netflix’s docuseries Babies, filmed over three years, follows 15 families from across the globe as they experience the first year in the life of a newborn, focusing on milestones including first food, first words, crawling, first steps, and the biological mysteries of love and sleep… Former spy Harry Langford (Chris Vance) returns to CBS’s Hawaii Five-0 (9/8c) to help the team solve murders that are suspiciously similar to those in an unpublished crime novel from the 1920s… Travel Channel visits more spooky locations in the Midwest in Haunting in the Heartland (10/9c), featuring filmmaker Steve Shippy, who claims to have grown up in a haunted house in Michigan. In the premiere, he visits a farming town in that state which has reportedly been held hostage by evil spirits since the 1800s.
