Amazon Prime Video, 12:00 a.m. ET
MOVIE PREMIERE: This new Amazon movie is a slight variant on a very familiar sci-fi theme, with a protagonist (Owen Wilson, in this case) beginning to question whether his very reality is a construct. He begins to look anew at the matrix, if not The Matrix, and evaluate his life and choices from there. What makes Bliss worthwhile is that his guide through this strange new, yet old and familiar, world is played by Salma Hayek, who brings sparkle and emotion to every role. Bliss, while close to the genre version of a Hallmark movie, is no exception.
Apple TV+, 3:00 a.m. ET
SERIES PREMIERE: The first Charles Schulz TV show based on his beloved Peanuts comic strip was in 1965. It’s still the best holiday television special ever made, and so full of wit and spirit, and an actual message, that it works just as well today. This new series, bringing Snoopy front and center and presenting three brief episodes in each installment, is very light on the moralism, but it does very well recreating the spirit of the rest of the original. Offscreen teachers and parents still talk like horn solos, Snoopy still dreams of aerial duels with the WWI flying ace the Red Baron, Lucy still counsels psychiatric “patients” for a nickel, and Schroeder still plays Beethoven on his toy piano. The kid voices are cast to sound like the ones from 55 years ago – yes, you read that right: 55 years, coming on 56 – and best of all, the soundtrack music is composed to sound like, or at least evoke echoes of, Vince Guaraldi’s fabulous jazz score for those original Peanuts TV specials. So even though The Snoopy Show is new, it also serves as a sort of instant nostalgia. Look, there’s Pigpen! And Woodstock! And Peppermint Patty!...
Disney+, 3:00 a.m. ET
The weekly episodes of WandaVision that drop each Friday on Disney+ have become, very quickly, one of the TV treats I most look forward to as the weekend approaches. After seeing only the first three episodes, I was excited by this Marvel TV show’s possibilities, and mused that it might be the first television show I can remember that began as a sitcom but had the potential to morph into an all-out drama. Last week, with Episode 4, it flirted with exactly that possibility. The entire show took place outside the city limits of Wanda’s sitcom “community,” offering a new perspective – one that played as a drama without a laugh track, and which featured Kat Dennings as her wisecracking, irreverent character from the Thor movies, watching the Wanda and Vision characters exist in a mysterious, seemingly invented, vintage-TV world. And when Dennings’ Darcy Lewis, looking at Wanda and Vision living in their apparently fabricated existence through a TV signal captured on the outskirts of town, says “I’m invested,” I laughed out loud. By that point, so was I. Today, Disney+ unveils Episode 5, which I expect will fuse the two worlds. For now. This show is exploring uncharted territory, and I’m happy to be along for the ride.
HBO, 10:00 p.m. ET
Among tonight’s guests, straight from the Real Time studio, is a TV personality who has hosted his own show, during this pandemic, both from his TV studio and from home: ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. Maher has visited Kimmel’s show and studio during this pandemic (pictured). Tonight, Kimmel returns the favor.
BBC America, 11:00 p.m. ET
Among tonight’s guests is Billie Piper, who was a young pop star in Britain before becoming a companion on Doctor Who 16 years ago, then maturing into an actress taking on very bold roles – and taking them on very well, whether as a sex worker in Secret Diary of a Call Girl or a reanimated corpse in the original Penny Dreadful. Her most recent TV series, which was imported to the U.S. last November by HBO Max, is I Hate Suzie (pictured), in which she stars as a celebrity whose phone is hacked and some embarrassing photos leaked to social media. She co-created the series as well, so she should have a lot to say about it – but based on previous visits to Norton’s talk show, Piper is likely to talk about just about anything.