The Expanse kicks off its sixth and final season on Amazon Prime Video
Plus: Riz Ahmed’s Encounter, Comedy Central’s Diwali-themed holiday movie, yet another Tiger King spin-off, and Kyle Mooney’s new Netflix comedy
TV Lists Amazon
Here’s what’s happening in the world of television for Friday, December 10, and Saturday, December 11. All times are Eastern.
Top pick
The Expanse (Amazon Prime Video, Friday, 12:01 a.m., season six premiere): The sixth and final season of this sci-fi drama picks up with the solar system at war. It will debut with the first episode and continue weekly for six weeks. Zack Handlen writes in his review: “As the show heads into its sixth and (at least on Amazon) final season, its episode run nearly halved, it has to find satisfying answers to a seeming infinite number of questions, along with providing dramatically sound resolutions to an ensemble with so many competing interests that anything approaching a happy ending seems legitimately impossible, if not outright suspect. It’s a big ask, basically, and it’s not entirely surprising that season six doesn’t quite manage the trick of dotting every i and crossing every Holden.”
Regular coverage
The Wheel Of Time (Amazon Prime Video, Friday, 12:01 a.m.)
Movie night
Encounter (Amazon Prime Video, Friday, 12:01 a.m.): “In the opening minutes of Encounter, a mosquito-like creature pierces its proboscis through a protective layer of human skin, going deep into flesh and blood. The little bug the attacker deposits inside its victim scuttles along vessels, burrows through connective tissue, and then explodes, jettisoning particles of itself outward to spread throughout the human body. The creepy-crawly tension of that early sequence teases the effective body horror filmmaker Michael Pearce weaves throughout Encounter. But the image also serves as a handy metaphor for the film’s failings: the way it infects an intriguing thriller of trauma and paranoia with invasive, consuming melodrama.” Read Roxana Hadadi’s full review of the movie, starring Riz Ahmed, here.
Hot Mess Holiday (Comedy Central, Saturday, 7 p.m.): Directed by Jaffar Mahmood, this barrier-breaking holiday film focuses on the celebrations of Diwali. Surina Jindal and Melanie Chandra star as best friends who embark on a wild holiday adventure party across Chicago, but when they come into possession of a multi-million dollar diamond, their messy antics place their entire posse in danger. The two actors co-produce along with Kal Penn and Sameer Gardezi. The primarily South Asian cast also includes Penn, Lilly Singh, Never Have I Ever’s Richa Moorjani, comedian Aparna Nancherla, and Ravi Patel, as well as Tituss Burgess, Chris Parnell, and Chris Geere.
Wild cards
Saturday Morning All Star Hits! (Netflix, Friday, 3:01 a.m.): SNL’s Kyle Mooney and Ben Jones lead the cast of this animation and live-action hybrid series, which mines the nostalgia of ’80s and ’90s television. Mooney plays Skip and Treybor, and takes a trip back to the cartoons of the Saturday morning era.
Tiger King: The Doc Antle Story (Netflix, Friday, 3:01 a.m.): It’s beginning to look like we may never be rid of Tiger King. After TK’s recent second season, Netflix is launching a spin-off of sorts focusing on Bhagavan Antle, a.k.a. Doc Antle. The three-episode docuseries from Rebecca Chaikin and Eric Goode chronicles his lifelong abuse of power as witnesses come forward to share their troubling stories that set him at the top of the food chain.
Snoopy Presents: For Auld Lang Syne (Apple TV+, Friday, 12:01 a.m.): After the Peanuts gang experience a disappointing Christmas because Grandma can’t visit, Lucy resolves to throw herself the best New Year’s Eve party ever, while Charlie Brown struggles to accomplish just one of his resolutions before the clock strikes twelve.
Crossing Swords (Hulu, Friday, 12:01 a.m., season two): In this stop-motion animated medieval comedy, Patrick (Nicholas Hoult) is a good-hearted peasant who works under a king no one particularly likes in a kingdom where no one is particularly happy. Patrick is the black sheep of the family, and his criminal siblings tend to make his life hell. The show is fairly graphic in its display of war, murder, and nudity. The voice cast includes Tony Hale, Seth Green, Adam Pally, Maya Erskine, Luke Evans, and Wendi McLendon-Covey.
Aranyak (Netflix, Friday, 3:01 a.m.): In this Indian-origin crime thriller, Kasturi (Raveena Tandon) is just about to retire from her small town police force when a terrible tragedy occurs. She joins hands with her incoming replacement, Angad (Parambrata Chatterjee), to determine who is responsible for the kidnapping and murder plots that are unraveling in the mountain-town of Sironah.
13 Comments
Do we need three more episodes to know that Doc Antle was running a sex cult and taking advantage of young women? Because it was pretty obvious in the original show.
B-b-b-but what if the person really responsible for Doc Antle’s sex cult was —gasp— Carole Baskin?!?!
As always, fuck Tiger King, fuck Eric Goode, fuck Rebecca Chaikin, and fuck Doc Asshole. May they all spontaneously combust and burn slowly to death.
I’m all in on the Kyle Mooney thing. It’s looks absolutely bonkers.
I can report: episode one of expanse season is very good, but it is clear it will be impossible to wrap everything up.Fuck Tiger King, worse than the Fyre Festival docs that were paying those responsible
Agreed on Tiger King, Fyre, and everyone involved. Regarding The Expanse: I was wondering why I’d stopped watching that show a couple of seasons ago, and then I saw the photo of Shohreh Aghdashloo above this article. Her role isn’t interesting, although it got way too much screen time, and her acting is horrifically one-note. Too bad, because everything around her really gels with my idea of good sci-fi.
I think she is great. I think she plays the part almost as a villain
On the Expanse, they’re not even attempting to wrap everything up. There are 9 books and this “final” season is adapting the 6th book. Amazon told the producers the 6th would be the final season after filming on season 5 finished. They were laying the foundation for the story in the final 3 books throughout season 5. Rather than try to squeeze the story of the last 4 books (6-9) into a single shortened season, which would also cut themselves off from a future adaptation of the final 3 books, they decided to just adapt book 6 as written and leave the door open to adapt the final 3 books at some point in the future (there’s a 30-year time jump between books 6 and 7), so they can wait years and/or recast the actors in the future.
you get out of the grays for a helpful comment
Thanks, and FYI, if you finish season 6 and are interested in how it ends, you can pick up and begin reading with book 7 if you don’t want to read books 1-6.The show is a fairly close adaptation of the books (obviously a compressed version), but none of the changes* will impact Show watchers from jumping into the book series with book 7.*Except of course for the fact that Alex survives through the beginning of book 7 as the character was killed off in the show because the actor was fired and they didn’t want to recast the character.
*Except of course for the fact that Alex survives through the beginning of book 7 as the character was killed off in the show because the actor was fired and they didn’t want to recast the character.Which was the most “Poochie Died On The Way Back To His Home Planet” thing I’d ever seen. They literally froze the frame and said “oops, he’s dead now.”
Yup, personally I wouldn’t have killed the character. Just would have written him out of season 6…say he was injured and is recovering on Mars. Then just recast the character if they ever end up adapting the last 3 books. The time jump is a perfect cover to replace him (or any other actors that don’t return).
OK, I watched all of Saturday Morning All-Star Hits! If
you grew up in the era of cartoons with C- level animation and zany tie-in products and recorded them on VHS over things your parents possibly wanted to save,
don’t miss it, but moreso if you are a fan of Mooney’s brand of bizarre
randomness, DO NOT MISS IT. This show, let me tell you, takes some turns
my friends.
Syfy canned the Expanse to make room for action movies…