Martin Scorsese hosts an hourlong documentary on PBS. And the serial-killer drama “Dexter” returns to Showtime (with a new subtitle).
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, Nov. 1-7. Details and times are subject to change.
Monday
THE LATE SHOW WITH STEPHEN COLBERT 11:35 p.m. on CBS. The singer-songwriter David Byrne, currently on Broadway with his “American Utopia,” will take advantage of a show-less night by popping over to the Ed Sullivan Theater on Monday to perform on Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show.” Huma Abedin, a former aide to Hillary Clinton who is releasing a memoir this week, is also slated to appear.
Tuesday
MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (2017) 5:15 p.m. on FXM. The actor and filmmaker Kenneth Branagh is set to return to theaters next week with “Belfast,” a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age movie. Branagh was behind the camera for “Belfast,” which he wrote and directed. But he was on both sides of the lens — directing and acting — for this Agatha Christie adaptation, in which he plays the fictional Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. He’s in good company: The cast also includes Penélope Cruz, Willem Dafoe, Judi Dench and Michelle Pfeiffer, among others. Christie fans should have fun seeing the distinguished cast act out the old mystery, though critical reception of the film was mixed. In truth, you might be better off sticking with the book. (If you’re worried about hurting Branagh’s feelings by skipping his movie, you’re in luck: He recorded a “Murder on the Orient Express” audiobook, too.)
THE BIRTHDAY CAKE (2021) 9 p.m. on Starz. Val Kilmer plays a mob boss in this modern-day Mafia drama, alongside a roster of other familiar faces including Ewan McGregor, Lorraine Bracco and Paul Sorvino. All portray characters in the orbit of a young man, Gio (Shiloh Fernandez). The film focuses on one revelatory night in Gio’s life, during which he learns truths about his father’s death 10 years earlier — and gets pulled into a violent life he’d tried to avoid. The movie is “brash, a little hokey and endearingly melodramatic,” Jeannette Catsoulis said in her review for The New York Times. “It’s not the fairly predictable tonal arc that makes this first feature from Jimmy Giannopoulos click,” she wrote, “it’s the deftness with which he weaves multiple threads of unease into a single strand of throttling tension.”
Wednesday
A JOHN HUSTON DOUBLE FEATURE 8 p.m. on TCM. Here’s a chance to relive John Huston’s early-1940s filmmaking emergence: At 8, TCM will air Huston’s directorial debut, the noir classic THE MALTESE FALCON (1941). Then, at 10, the network will show ACROSS THE PACIFIC (1942), Huston’s third feature, which transplanted three stars from “The Maltese Falcon” — Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet — into a World War II spy story, and helped cement Huston’s reputation as an important Hollywood filmmaker. “This time it is certain,” Bosley Crowther wrote in his 1942 review for The Times, “Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed and all other directors who have hit the top flight with melodramas will have to make space for John Huston.”
Thursday
THE QUEEN FAMILY SINGALONG 8 p.m. on ABC. As the gentlemen of “Wayne’s World” know well, few bands are as ready-made for over-the-top singalongs than Queen. Seize the opportunity with this hourlong special, in which pop acts including Adam Lambert, Fall Out Boy and Pentatonix cover Queen songs. The actor Darren Criss hosts.
Friday
THE ORATORIO: A DOCUMENTARY WITH MARTIN SCORSESE 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). When this new, hourlong special begins, it greets viewers with close-up shots of the historic Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in NoLIta. The camera takes in the holy building’s interior, tilting up stained glass and panning across lit candles, finally settling on a former altar boy, now a gray-haired man, ambling along the cathedral’s aisles. The man is Martin Scorsese. And he’s there to geek out, for Scorsese has come to discuss a landmark performance at the cathedral: A one-off show in 1826 that brought Italian opera to New York. The documentary, which also features interviews with experts, including the musicologist Francesco Zimei, looks at the 1826 performance as a piece of New York’s foundation as an arts hub, and an example of how the city’s immigrants were central to the cementing of its identity. The documentary will be followed, at 10 p.m., by DA PONTE’S ORATORIO: A CONCERT FOR NEW YORK, a program built around footage of a 2018 performance by the Italian opera company Teatro Lirico di Cagliari, which recreated the 1826 show in the present-day cathedral.
Saturday
LAND (2021) 8 p.m. on HBO. Robin Wright plays a grieving woman who goes into the wild in this sweeping drama, which is also Wright’s feature directorial debut. After experiencing a tragedy, Wright’s character, a lawyer named Edee, buys a cabin in a secluded slice of Rocky Mountain wilderness. She drives there, then she ditches the car. Edee is determined to survive solo, or maybe simply to be alone in nature — whether she actually wants to survive isn’t clear. That is, at least, until a near-death experience causes her to cross paths with a hunter, Miguel (Demián Bichir), with whom she forms a mutually lifesaving bond. “Wright’s movie is ambitious (that location! that weather!), but not grandiose,” Glenn Kenny wrote in his review for The Times. “Its storytelling economy helps make it credible and eventually moving.”
Sunday
DEXTER: NEW BLOOD 9 p.m. on Showtime. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, or at least makes you grow a beard and buy some flannel shirts. The finale of the original “Dexter” series, which ended in 2013, wrapped up with its titular character, a mild-mannered serial killer played by Michael C. Hall, getting caught in a lethal-looking storm. It didn’t leave any ambiguity about whether he survived, though: The final moments flashed forward to Dexter, alive, having escaped from the authorities in Miami to start a new life in the Pacific Northwest. This continuation of the story, which carries the subtitle “New Blood,” moves the action forward a decade and to a fictional town in upstate New York, where Dexter works to control his violent urges under an assumed identity. When the show debuted in 2006, Hall discussed in an interview with The Times the challenges of approaching Dexter as an actor. “How do you bring your full human self to someone who at least claims to be without the capacity for human emotions?” Hall asked. “It’s tricky.” One wonders, 15 years later, whether that challenge has gotten easier or harder with practice.
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What’s on TV This Week: ‘The Oratorio’ and ‘Dexter: New Blood’ - The New York Times
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