HBO spotlights Rock & Roll Hall class
The 2021 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony (8 p.m. Saturday, HBO) draws on various genres and eras, honoring artists living and dead. It can also be streamed on HBO Max.
This year’s class, inducted on Oct. 30 in Cleveland, includes Tina Turner, Carole King, The Go-Go’s, Jay-Z, Foo Fighters and Todd Rundgren. Kraftwerk, Charley Patton and Gil Scott-Heron receive an Early Influence Award. LL Cool J, Billy Preston and Randy Rhoads are cited for musical excellence. Clarence Avant receives the Ahmet Ertegun Award, created for non-performing professionals vital to the music scene.
At least two of this year’s inductees were subjects of 2020 documentaries. Recently seen on HBO, “Tina” chronicled Tina Turner’s life as a teenage performer during the early years of rock and roll, her often abusive relationship with rock pioneer Ike Turner and her rebirth as a solo performer in the 1980s and beyond. The film moved beyond the fabled 1993 biopic “What’s Love Got to Do With It” to present Turner as more than a victim and survivor and explore her role in the history of popular music of the last half-century.
Seen on Showtime last year, “The Go-Go’s” also set out to rescue an act from a rather fixed reputation. Seen as an “overnight sensation” ready made for MTV in the early 1980s, the film shows the group’s long evolution in the California punk scene and various members’ struggles with addiction. In many ways the film gave the band the “street cred” it never received during its heyday, since it was almost instantly pigeonholed as a group of pretty and perky “girls.”
“Tina” can be streamed on HBO Max.
› On a similar note, Cardi B hosts the 2021 American Music Awards (8 p.m. Sunday, ABC), live from Los Angeles.
› “Yellowjackets” (10 p.m. Sunday, Showtime, TV-MA) returns for its second episode. This weird thriller runs some familiar themes through a post-feminist food mill. Not unlike the recent “Mare of Easttown,” “Yellowjackets” follows the adult travails of female former high school sports stars decades removed from their glory. And like Amazon Prime’s “The Wilds,” it follows flashbacks of high school stereotypes stranded in a deserted locale, but it takes these themes to dark new extremes.
Back in 1996, the Yellowjackets were a New Jersey high school soccer team on their way to the finals. It’s clear that neither their town, their teachers nor their coaches know what to make of their success. Raised in a pre-Title IX mentality, these adults would rather lavish praise on a mediocre boys’ baseball team than recognize potential national champions in their midst.
All of this becomes academic when the team plane crashes, stranding the athletes in the wilderness and forcing them to fend for themselves for 19 months. Along the way, activities occur that would not be out of place in “Lord of the Flies” or “Alive,” the oft-told tale of a Uruguayan rugby team reduced to cannibalism after a 1972 plane disaster.
No wonder few of the survivors want to see or talk to each other in 2021, or discuss their ordeal with a reporter who promises to ghost-write a memoir for an easy “seven figures.”
The themes here are rather obvious. But savagery and subtlety rarely mix. On the soccer field, the Yellowjackets proved equal to any male athletes. Once left to their own devices, their need to survive and dominate went to unspeakable extremes.
› “Caesar’s Doomsday War” (8 p.m. Sunday, Science, TV-PG) examines archaeological finds and uses new 3D animation to explore Rome’s war with a worthy opponent that almost destroyed its legions and earned a fearful reputation for savage resistance.