What’s on TV This Week: ‘The First Lady’ and ‘Abbott Elementary’
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, April 11-17. Details and times are subject to change.
Monday
2022 CMT MUSIC AWARDS 8 p.m. on CBS. The country-pop singer Kelsea Ballerini and the actor Anthony Mackie will host this year’s CMT Music Awards ceremony, which will be broadcast live from the Nashville Municipal Auditorium in Tennessee, about a 10-minute walk from the honky-tonk bars of Broadway. The singer Kane Brown has the most nominations of the night, with four. Ballerini, Mickey Guyton, Breland and Cody Johnson are also among the most-nominated acts. The lineup of performers includes Brown, Guyton with Black Pumas, Miranda Lambert, Little Big Town, Maren Morris with Ryan Hurd, and Jason Aldean with Bryan Adams.
INDEPENDENT LENS: JIM ALLISON: BREAKTHROUGH (2019)10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). When James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo were awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in medicine, a statement from the Nobel committee said it all: The two researchers’ breakthrough work, which used the body’s immune system to attack cancer, amounted to “an entirely new principle for cancer therapy.” This documentary from Bill Haney (“The Price of Sugar”) is a profile of Allison, looking at the life that led him toward his groundbreaking research — in part, the loss of family members to cancer — and the challenges he faced moving his unconventional ideas forward.In his review for The New York Times, Ben Kenigsberg wrote that the documentary itself lacks the kind of innovative touch that it celebrates in its subject, but still “does a solid job of explaining the barriers — justified skepticism, professional groupthink, the high cost of long-term research — that Allison faced in proving that a new kind of treatment could work.”
Tuesday
ABBOTT ELEMENTARY 9 p.m. on ABC. The first season of Quinta Brunson’s sitcom ends on Tuesday night with an episode about a school field trip to a zoo. The show stars Brunson as a teacher in a Philadelphia public elementary school whose staff members are as passionate as they are wacky — and it has been a very big hit this season. In a recent article, The Times’s chief television critic, James Poniewozik, called it the best sitcom of the season. It’s “not a year’s supply of pencils,” he wrote. “But it is something else significant: Sustained attention for a profession that, however much lip service we pay it, usually gets lost among TV’s stable of doctors, lawyers and police.”
Wednesday
THE FLORIDA PROJECT (2017) 5:20 p.m. on Showtime Showcase. After offering an idiosyncratic, shot-on-an-iPhone slice of Los Angeles in “Tangerine” (2015), the writer-director Sean Baker crossed the country to tell a story about a trio of children who live near Disney World in a ramshackle, sherbet-colored motel called the Magic Castle. This is the setting of “The Florida Project,” a drama centered on a 6-year-old girl, Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), who has summertime adventures even as she and the adults around her grapple with the stresses and desperation of poverty. The result is a movie that “is honest about the limits of benevolence, and about the wishful thinking that can cloud our understanding of the world,” A.O. Scott said in his review for The Times. “Its final scenes,” he wrote, “are devastating, and also marvelously ambiguous, full of wonder, fury and cleareyed self-criticism.”
Thursday
THE TIME MACHINE (1960) 8 p.m. on TCM. H.G. Wells’s formative 1895 novella “The Time Machine” was one of the first books to imagine a device that would allow people to hop through time. This 1960 film adaptation starts its story in the same Victorian time period that the original book came out. Watching its protagonist (played by Rod Taylor) feels especially surreal when the viewer is in 2022.
Friday
CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY RETURNS 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). This two-part documentary looks at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s efforts to come back fully from a pandemic hiatus. It covers the challenges of bringing live performances back to Alice Tully Hall and the planning of a multicity tour that must allow for the uncertainty of the era. Part 1, which debuted last week, is now available to stream on PBS.org and the PBS app; Part 2 will air on Friday night.
Saturday
FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM (2016) and FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE CRIMES OF GRINDELWALD (2018) 7:55 p.m. and 10:53 p.m. on USA Network. The third movie in the “Harry Potter” spinoff series “Fantastic Beasts” — subtitled “The Secrets of Dumbledore” — hits U.S. theaters this week. These first two entries weren’t particularly well received, but for families who want to brush up on the lore, this double feature offers a refresher. And for those seeing the new movie, it offers an interesting opportunity to judge two takes on one character: The titular evil wizard in “Crimes of Grindelwald” was played by Johnny Depp, who has been replaced by Mads Mikkelsen in the new movie.
Sunday
THE FIRST LADY 9 p.m. on Showtime. In truth, the singular “lady” in the title of this new drama series is a little misleading: There are three of them. The show layers the stories of a trio of first ladies of the United States — Michelle Obama, Betty Ford and Eleanor Roosevelt — comparing and contrasting their experiences navigating the White House during different eras of American political life, but contending with many common expectations. It has three heavy-hitting performers in Viola Davis (as Obama), Michelle Pfeiffer (Ford) and Gillian Anderson (Roosevelt).
