Disney+, 3:00 a.m. ET
Disney+ provided critics only the first three episodes of WandaVision in advance – and while they were intriguing and imaginative, they also were very much like place-setters. The sitcom format of those opening episodes was fine, taking us through TV “worlds” of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, but I wondered when writing my review where WandaVision intended to go from there. It could, I imagined, be the first TV series I can recall to shift in midstream from sitcom to drama. Little did I know that in this series, which stars Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany as Marvel movie characters Wanda and Vision, the shift would take place in the very next episode – but Episode 4, which began streaming this morning and I got up early to see, does exactly that, by taking an outsider perspective on the suburban neighborhood presented in WandaVision. Get ready for a familiar face or two from the wider Marvel universe – but also get ready for another shift next week, because who knows what’s coming next? Not I. Or me. We’re both deliriously in the dark…
HBO Max, 3:00 a.m. ET
MOVIE PREMIERE: Three Academy Award winners co-star in this new cop drama, the story of the hunt for a serial killer. Denzel Washington plays a California deputy sheriff on the trail of a devious murderer, Rami Malek plays a detective, and Jared Leto is, let’s say, a person of interest. Given the trio of leading players, this whole HBO Max movie premiere should be of interest – and what’s more, The Little Things is written and directed by John Lee Hancock, who did such a good job directing another Oscar winner, Tom Hanks, in Saving Mr. Banks.
TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET
Included in this Orson Welles movie masterpiece is the story of a man who rises to celebrity and prominence, uses his celebrity to run for public office, spreads untruths in the media aggressively and for his own nefarious purposes, and plans, all the while, to accuse the election of being rigged in the event he loses. This movie was made in 1941. Too bad that, 70 years later, there’s nothing we can find in it that’s relatable to our modern experiences.