“Snowpiercer” returns on TNT. And Alan Tudyk stars in a new comedy series on Syfy.
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. 25-Jan. 31. Details and times are subject to change.
Monday
SNOWPIERCER 9 p.m. on TNT. Daveed Diggs and Jennifer Connelly star in this science-fiction thriller series, based on both Bong Joon Ho’s sci-fi film of the same name and on the series of French graphic-novels that inspired that film. All three share a biting social commentary and a post-apocalyptic setting: A train circling a frozen earth ravaged by a climate calamity, carrying a population of human survivors who are divided by class. The first season of the TV series introduced a former police detective (Diggs) and a member of the train’s bourgeois leadership, Melanie Cavill (Connelly), who holds a rare sympathy for the train’s lower-class inhabitants. The second season, debuting on Monday night, will reveal more about the train’s mysterious billionaire creator, played by Sean Bean. The show has unplanned echoes with real, present life — as Connelly pointed out in an interview with The New York Times in May of last year, when the first season debuted. “Everyone on that train has been separated from their communities, the lives that they lived, the places that they loved,” she said. “We didn’t imagine that, by time this show came out, we would all be living a version of that.” Going into the second season, that grave resonance remains.
UNSTOPPABLE (2010) 5:30 p.m. on AMC. For a choo-choo experience with less social bite (but more wizz-banging) than “Snowpiercer,” consider “Unstoppable,” an action movie with Denzel Washington and Chris Pine. Directed by Tony Scott, the film casts Washington as a veteran railman who gets paired with a younger conductor (Pine). The plot follows the pair’s efforts to stop a runaway train filled with toxic cargo, which threatens to cause an environmental catastrophe should the train derail. Their mission makes for “nutty, kinetic entertainment,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. Scott, she wrote, “creates an unexpectedly rich world of chugging, rushing trains slicing across equally beautiful industrial and natural landscapes.”
Tuesday
MIXED-ISH 9:30 p.m. on ABC. Kenya Barris’s sitcom “black-ish” got a neon jolt of 1980s flavor with “mixed-ish,” a prequel series that debuted in 2019. The prequel looks at the childhood of Rainbow (Arica Himmel), the character played by Tracee Ellis Ross in the main series, and her experience coming of age as a multiracial American teenager at that time. The second season kicks off on Tuesday night with the family discovering that Rainbow’s brother, Johan (Ethan William Childress), has been misrepresenting his race.
FORD V FERRARI (2019) 9:05 p.m. on HBO2. This year, Ford is rolling out an electric Mustang crossover to rival Tesla, and Ferrari is preparing to release its first S.U.V. But in 1966, those two car manufacturers went toe-to-toe, pedal to the gas-guzzling metal at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France. This historical drama, directed by James Mangold, dramatizes that race and the events leading up to it from Ford’s perspective, centering on Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Ken Miles (Christian Bale), who work together to develop a car that can outpace their Italian rivals.
Wednesday
RESIDENT ALIEN 10 p.m. on Syfy. Chris Sheridan, a longtime writer for “Family Guy,” is behind this sci-fi comedy, an adaptation of the Dark Horse comic series of the same name. The story follows Harry, an alien who crash-lands on earth and assumes the identity of a doctor in a small Colorado town. Human viewers of the show may realize that this alien doctor is actually Alan Tudyk, the shape-shifting actor who played the “Star Wars” droid K-2SO and the parrot Iago in 2019’s “Aladdin.”
Thursday
THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI (2017) 5:50 p.m. on FXM. Frances McDormand’s name is on the tongues of awards-season pundits this year for her role in “Nomadland,” a road drama from Chloé Zhao that’s due out next month on Hulu and in theaters. McDormand won an Academy Award a few years ago for her role in this dark crime dramedy written and directed by Martin McDonagh. She plays a Missouri mother seeking justice for her daughter’s murder — justice that she’s not getting from the town’s ailing police chief (Woody Harrelson) and a tempestuous deputy (Sam Rockwell). In her review for The Times, Manohla Dargis took issue with McDonagh’s filmmaking, writing that his “bids at humor grow progressively less successful.” But she praised the performances, particularly McDormand, who she wrote “makes pain so palpably all-encompassing that you see it in her character’s every glance and gesture.”
Friday
IN CONCERT AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). With in-person performances still on hiatus, the Hollywood Bowl recently started broadcasting collections of archival performances through the “In Concert at the Hollywood Bowl” program. The 9 p.m. broadcast on Friday features a performance from Dianne Reeves and a jazz jam session with Herbie Hancock, Carlos Santana, Wayne Shorter, Marcus Miller and Cindy Blackman Santana. It is followed at 10 p.m. by a second program built around show tunes. Performers in that segment include Audra McDonald and Kristin Chenoweth.
Saturday
BURDEN (2020) 9 p.m. on Showtime. Garrett Hedlund plays a South Carolina Klan member who renounces his ways thanks to the extreme kindness of a small-town preacher (Forest Whitaker) in this redemption drama. The film, which is based on a true story, “is often preachy and overripe with white-power symbolism,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for The Times. “Yet its mood of airless bigotry is quite effective, portraying the Klan’s influence with officials and the police as an ingrained stain on the fabric of the town.”
Sunday
LADY AND THE DALE 9 p.m. on HBO. In the 1970s, an ostensible entrepreneur named Elizabeth Carmichael began touting the Dale, a fuel-efficient, three-wheeled car that promised to be revolutionary. It turned out to be a sham. This new documentary mini-series revisits the case.
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