Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Jan. 2-8. Details and times are subject to change.
Monday
INDEPENDENT LENS: CHILDREN OF LAS BRISAS (2023) 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The aspirations and creativity of young musicians tug against political turbulence and humanitarian crises in “Children of Las Brisas,” a documentary that follows members of a Venezuelan youth orchestra coming of age during that country’s revolution and the fallout of the death of its former president Hugo Chávez. When the film played at the DOC NYC festival in 2022, its director, Marianela Maldonado, described the intent behind it. “It’s about the pain of growing up with dreams of being an artist while living in a dysfunctional society,” she said. “It’s a story of survival and redemption through music.”
WHITNEY: CAN I BE ME (2017) 6:15 p.m. on Showtime. There’s a dramatized version of the singer Whitney Houston’s life in theaters right now: the biopic “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” For a nonfictional portrait, consider this feature-length doc, which pairs the voices of some of Houston’s friends, family members and collaborators with tour footage from the late 1990s. The result, Ben Kenigsberg wrote in his review for The New York Times, is “a surprisingly conventional, dutifully respectful behind-the-scenes portrait.”
Tuesday
FINDING YOUR ROOTS 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). In the first episode of the new season of his genealogy show, the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. presents the actress Julia Roberts with a book filled with research about Roberts’s family history. Roberts, lifting the tome, looks at Gates with a smile. “This has got some heft to it,” she says. That’s often true — in more ways than one — of the research that anchors the series, which uses D.N.A. analysis and historical sleuthing to uncover the often-complicated backgrounds of its celebrity guests. Tuesday’s episode, which kicks off the show’s ninth season, features Roberts and Edward Norton. Other guests this season include the movie stars Claire Danes, Viola Davis and Danny Trejo; the pop star Cyndi Lauper; and the activist and scholar Angela Davis.
Wednesday
BULLITT (1968) 8 p.m. on TCM. When this now-classic neo-noir opened at Radio City Music Hall in the fall of 1968, the critic Renata Adler wrote in her review for The Times that it was “a terrific movie, just right for Steve McQueen — fast, well acted, written the way people talk.” But McQueen, the human celebrity, had to share the spotlight with a material co-star: a 1968 Ford Mustang, which has become as much a symbol of the movie as McQueen. Watch man and machine undulate and snap over San Francisco streets as McQueen’s Lt. Frank Bullitt chases mafiosos.
Thursday
A LOVE SONG (2022) 8 p.m. on Showtime. With a grand landscape and a modest story, this debut feature from the filmmaker Max Walker-Silverman centers on a widow, Faye (Dale Dickey), at a lakeside campsite in Colorado. She’s waiting on the arrival of her childhood friend Lito (Wes Studi), whom she hasn’t seen in years. Faye is isolated before Lito arrives, but things remain quiet even after he shows up; the chemistry between the two is expressed as much in silences and facial expressions as in words. It’s a “tender, laconic” movie, Jeannette Catsoulis said in her review for The Times. “More than one kind of love is being celebrated in that title, including the director’s affection for his home state, its wide-open spaces and wandering souls.”
Friday
RUPAUL’S DRAG RACE 8 p.m. on MTV. RuPaul’s mighty drag competition show moves to MTV from its old home, VH1, for its new, 15th season, which kicks off on Friday night with a two-hour special. The new season gathers 16 drag queens from around the country — the show’s largest cast ever — and is set to include guest appearances from Ariana Grande, Janelle Monáe and other celebrities.
BOYS IN BLUE 8 p.m. on Showtime. In this four-part documentary series, the filmmaker Peter Berg (who brought “Friday Night Lights” to television) follows a high school football team in Minneapolis after the 2020 killing of George Floyd. The students had a unique and potent experience of that moment: Their team is mentored by Minneapolis police officers. Berg focuses on the tensions and conversations between players and officers.
THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT (2022) 9 p.m. on Starz. Nicolas Cage plays a fictionalized version of himself in this action comedy, which has its tongue stuck so solidly in its cheek that it would be hard to say “I’m going to steal the Declaration of Independence.” The plot, such as it is, involves Cage attending the birthday party of a mega-rich fan (Pedro Pascal). “It’s another Nicolas Cage joint, a romp, a showcase, an eager-to-please ode to him in all his sui generis Caginess,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. “That’s the idea, at any rate. Mostly, though, it is a single joke sustained for 106 minutes, amid many rapid tone shifts, mood swings and set changes.”
Sunday
ANNE RICE’S MAYFAIR WITCHES 9 p.m. on AMC. The novelist Anne Rice’s “Lives of the Mayfair Witches” book trilogy — “The Witching Hour” (1990), “Lasher” (1993) and “Taltos” (1994) — gets a TV adaptation with this new show, which casts Alexandra Daddario as Dr. Rowan Fielding, a neurosurgeon who learns that she is a descendant of a family of witches haunted by a menacing force. If “neurosurgeon” sounds like surprisingly scientific territory for a novelist whose primary interest lies in the supernatural, consider this point that Rice made in an interview with The Times in 2021, shortly before her death. “I think some might be surprised by the sheer volume of science writing I own,” Rice said. “When you invent alternate worlds and supernatural cosmologies, it can be incredibly inspiring to read about how little we still know about the underlying fabric of the universe.”
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