Class of ’20 graduation goes digital
Here’s something you don’t see every day. Since the pandemic has closed so many schools, and social distancing doesn’t allow for mass gatherings, “Graduate Together: America Honors the High School Class of 2020” (8 p.m. Saturday, CBS, NBC, Fox, ABC, Univision, Freeform, CNN, MSNBC) offers students a “virtual” ceremony.
Organized by the LeBron James Family Foundation, it will feature a series of distinguished commencement speakers.
Look for addresses from former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama, as well participation by the Jonas Brothers, Bad Bunny, H.E.R., Charli D’Amelio, Megan Rapinoe, Yara Shahidi, Lena Waithe, Pharrell Williams and Malala Yousafzai.
The event’s website (https://www.graduatetogether2020.com/#shareyourstory) has encouraged students to upload their yearbook pictures, memories and teacher appreciations.
In addition to the networks listed above, “Graduate Together” can also be streamed on Facebook, YouTube and TikTok.
As strange as it sounds, the peculiarity of this year’s graduating events will certainly make them more memorable. Years from now, the class of 2020 will be able to look back at how they showed resilience during a difficult time.
› A convenient corpse will open any door. Series with complicated situations, unusual settings or speculative takes on a tech-heavy future or descent into dystopia are easier to approach when wrapped up in a murder mystery.
Recently, this technique has allowed the FX on Hulu series “Devs” to explore mind-bending questions of time, fate, predestination and reality. Amazon Prime’s comedy “Upload” presented a brave new world of a consumer-friendly afterlife, also swaddled in a whodunnit.
This weekend, two new series present a mystery cadaver as their first course. The strenuously contrived “Snowpiercer” (9 p.m. Sunday, TNT, TV-MA) envisions a frozen future where the only survivors of an environmental disaster continuously circle the globe on a super train with 1,000 cars. Most of the passenger service caters to the Grey Poupon crowd, but way back in steerage, a seething demimonde of starving stowaways plot revolution. When not tending to their pet rats! If you guessed this series was based on a movie adapted from a comic book, you would be right.
Things only get interesting when one of the rebels (Daveed Diggs) is dragged to the nicer cars due to his earlier career as a homicide detective. It seems there’s a killer loose among the posh set! His reluctant assistance to the corporate authorities and the hospitality director (Jennifer Connelly) is the only story element that elevates “Snowpiercer” from dismal adolescent tripe.
› Jerry Bruckheimer goes to Provincetown. OK, that’s not the plot to “Hightown” (8 p.m. Sunday, Starz, TV-MA). But it sums up the series nicely.
The Massachusetts fishing village at the very end of Cape Cod has been a gay resort for decades, a place where blue-collar locals rub shoulders with flamboyant visitors. Add a murder mystery and you have the perfect place for prolific producer Bruckheimer (“Top Gun,” “Bad Boys,” “CSI”) to mix sex, violence and frantic stereotyping.
Monica Raymund (“Chicago Fire”) plays Jackie Quinones, a hard-drinking, drug-guzzling woman who sees Provincetown as her own personal lesbian Disneyland, a tourist trap that brings her new conquests every night.