Only one word best describes the Coen Brothers’ 1996 movie “Fargo”: genius. It creates a parallel universe where a desperate family man contracts with criminals and gets tripped up by a cop who’s shrewder than she looks. The Coens keep comedy and carnage, satire and suspense, in perfect balance. As
Read More →With “Beavis and Butt-head,” Mike Judge established himself as the bard of mumbling, antisocial, all-American nerds. But Judge tops himself with “Silicon Valley” (Sunday, 9 p.m., HBO), which locates the nerve center of modern-day nerd culture in the San Francisco area’s tech industry. Our hero is, at first glance, anything
Read More →For the life of me, I will never understand polygamy. Never mind that I watch TV for a living and thus am both intellectually and physically undesirable to a woman not vying for American citizenship and destined to be a bachelor for life. I won’t pretend that is by choice,
Read More →In a stunning one-man show called “Ghetto Klown” (Saturday, 9 p.m., HBO), John Leguizamo presents a “cautionary tale.” He details his progression from a poor Latino boy to a showbiz star to a jerk. Leguizamo may be the most appealing jerk in Broadway history. He gets the live audience laughing
Read More →An icy CEO (Gillian Anderson), a troubled ex-CIA analyst (Dermot Mulroney) and other D.C. parents drop off their kids at an elite high school for a field trip. Before long, the bus is ambushed by criminal masterminds who blackmail the well-connected parents to do their bidding. This could mean the
Read More →A 10-year-old girl named Bo (Johnny Sequoyah) has extraordinary powers, along with being extraordinarily cute. She can see the future, control nature and even save the world — that is, if the bad guys don’t kidnap her for their own nefarious purposes. At the start of the new series “Believe”
Read More →The acclaimed “Bates Motel” (Monday, 8 p.m., A&E) adapts Alfred Hitchcock’s horror classic “Psycho,” as Norma Bates (Vera Farmiga) and troubled son Norman (Freddie Highmore) run a motel in a town with more than its share of unexplained murders. The second-season premiere contains all the perversity you’d expect while still
Read More →Clark (Steve Zahn) is a disgraced academic with bipolar disorder. Russ (Christian Slater) is his perpetually exasperated con-man brother, just out of prison for fraud. This odd couple starts an ethically questionable business that can alter the way people act, based on Clark’s experimental research on “adrenalized implantation.” In the
Read More →After aliens crash-land on Earth, the military herds them into a detention camp. They look just like humans — indeed, the gorgeous alien teenagers could easily be mistaken for stars of a CW series — but most Earthlings despise them. As an experiment in integration, the authorities allow seven alien
Read More →“Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth” (Friday, 8:30 p.m., PBS) tells the unlikely story of a poor African American sharecropper’s daughter who dedicates herself to changing the world and, against all odds, does. Walker immersed herself in the civil rights and women’s liberation struggles of the 1960s and wrote about them
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