What’s Tuesday’s worst new show?
The melodrama “Our Kind of People” has been replaced on tonight’s schedule by a repeat of “The Masked Singer” (9 p.m., Fox, repeat, TV-PG). While scheduled to return next week, “Our Kind” was conspicuously absent from a recent Fox release about its early 2022 plans.
A gossipy soap about a brilliant hairstylist (Yaya DaCosta) out to return to her late mother’s haunts in a snooty Black resort enclave, “Kind” suffered from obvious plotting and wooden dialogue.
As bad as “Our Kind” is (or soon, was), it’s not the worst new Tuesday night network series. That has to be NBC’s preposterous “La Brea,” a cosmic headscratcher about a mystical sinkhole that is both insanely over-the-top and remarkably familiar and predictable. As bad as “La Brea” seems, it’s not half as cloying as “Ordinary Joe.” Amazingly, “La Brea” has been renewed for a second season. At least “La Brea” and “Joe” represent NBC’s efforts to try something/ anything different, and not rely solely on well-worn franchises like CBS, home to three “FBI” helpings on Tuesdays.
› A new “Frontline” (10 p.m., PBS, TV-PG, check local listings) segment, “Shots Fired” follows a police training academy in Utah and examines tactics as well as how force is deployed in different neighborhoods.
› While many focus on institutional racism in law enforcement and how a history of racism is taught or not taught in America’s schools, one of the most glaring examples of racial blindness and disparity resides in the television news media, most specifically in how it reports (or ignores) coverage of the disappearance of young people, particularly young women.
Produced by Emmy-winning editor Geeta Gandbhir and CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien, “Black and Missing” (8 p.m. and 9 p.m., HBO, TV-MA) follows Derrica and Natalie Wilson, the founders of the Black and Missing Foundation, who strive to make media outlets aware of the thousands of women reported missing every year, many of them Black, Latina or Native American.
This documentary debuts scant weeks after the end of the Gabby Petito story, one in a string of media frenzies dedicated to the fate of one photogenic white woman, to the exclusion of so many other stories.
Are the media outlets that focus so intently on such stories — known informally as Missing White Woman Syndrome (MWWS) — racist? Or are they simply following their audience’s whims and desires? The folks at CNN probably figured that the second they stopped reporting on the Petito saga, viewers would turn elsewhere for obsessive coverage. Is such “news” a sign of reporters’ bias, or of a society that can’t be bothered to care about missing women of color? Is the “news” a medium or a mirror?
› Shudder, the streaming service devoted to horror, debuts “The Strings,” a 2021 shocker about a musician who quits her band to relax and regroup in a secluded cottage, whose supernatural tenants have other plans.