Go On the Run With ‘The Mosquito Coast,’ ‘MacGyver’ Farewell, ‘Blue Bloods’ Goes Undercover, Another Tom Clancy Adaptation

Series Premiere

Go on the run with the Fox family in this new Apple TV+ show, which premieres today with the first two episodes. Allie Fox (Justin Theroux) is a brilliant inventor, but then why is he and his family so poor? That’s what Allie’s daughter Dina (Logan Polish) wants to know, and she has a point. The kids, including younger son Charlie (Gabriel Bateman), are homeschooled, and no one is allowed to use phones or the internet. In a heartbreaking scene, Allie’s entrancing wife Margot (Melissa George), breaks the rules and calls her parents, in tears about how much she misses them. What is the family hiding from? Whatever it is though, Allie’s paranoia proves well-placed when the U.S. government comes after the family, forcing them to flee. It’s one twist after another while Allie and Margot go to extreme lengths to evade the police, and keep their family together.

Series Finale

After five seasons, the reboot of the uber-resourceful secret agent is coming to a close, but it’s not going out without a bang. In a climactic finale, MacGyver (Lucas Till) and super-hacker Riley (Tristin Mays) wake up in a cornfield with no clue how they got there and no memory of the last 24 hours. What’s worse, they also find they have nano-trackers embedded in their bodies. In a race against time, they have to unravel the mystery of who took them, why, and how to get rid of the nano-trackers.

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Jamie (Will Estes) makes waves when he contests the arrest report of a fellow officer who was assaulted in the field. It doesn’t help that the officer in question is a rising rookie with allies in city hall. The news makes its way all the way to One PP, and Police Commissioner Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck) is forced to give his son an official reprimand when Jamie refuses to say why he contests the report, but knowing Jamie, he has a very good reason for doing so. Meanwhile, Danny (Donnie Wahlberg) and Baez (Marisa Ramirez) clash when their lead suspect for the murder of a legendary comedy club owner is one of Danny’s favorite stand-up comics. Eddie’s (Vanessa Ray) always eager to take undercover assignments when she can get them, and this time is no different when Anthony (Steven Schirripa) offers her one, but she balks when she finds out that his informant is Don Voorhees (James Le Gros), a former corrupt parole officer she and Jamie arrested.

Movie Premiere

This movie is set in the same universe as Prime Video’s Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan and stars Michael B. Jordan as a soldier turned CIA agent. Jordan plays patriotic Navy SEAL John Kelly who loses his pregnant wife (Lauren London) in a retaliatory attack by the Russians. In his quest for vengeance, Kelly goes rogue and finds himself in the middle of a high level conspiracy and is eventually forced to change his identity and become CIA agent John Clark. It’s the first in what Jordan and director Stefano Sollima hope will be a series of movies about this character, and a crossover with John Krasinski’s Jack Ryan isn’t out of the question.

Inside Friday TV:

• Big Shot (streaming on Disney+): Coach Marvyn Korn’s (Full House’s John Stamos) daughter Emma (Sophia Mitri Schloss) arrives to live with him and attend the school this week, as Marvyn works to move the basketball team up to Division 2.
• Daddy’s Perfect Little Girl (8/7c, Lifetime Movie Network): 12-year-old Sienna (Hattie Kragten) is very attached to her adoptive widowed father (Matt Wells), and feels threatened when he starts dating a new woman (Tracy Shreve) with a teenage son (Joshua Obra).
• The Blacklist (8/7c, NBC): The Task Force plans to steal a Soviet-era cipher machine to use to decrypt coded messages.
• Magnum P.I. (9/8c, CBS): When Magnum’s (Jay Hernandez) Uncle Bernardo (Steven Michael Quezada) visits, he reveals a huge secret about Magnum’s mother. Meanwhile, TC (Stephen Hill) asks Higgins (Perdita Weeks) for help when he thinks he may have witnessed a murder from his helicopter.