‘Hawkeye’ arrives for the holidays
Released with great fanfare, a built-in audience and virtually critic-proof, “Hawkeye” arrives as a six-episode thriller on Disney+. For those keeping score, it’s the fifth iteration from the Marvel Cinematic Universe related to the big-screen blockbuster “Avengers: Endgame.”
Jeremy Renner reprises his role as Clint Barton, who is also the titular hero/archer. He has a weary dad vibe about him, a sign that he’d rather give this all up and leave the ultraviolence to younger straight shooters like Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld).
As much as “Hawkeye” owes to the Marvel canon, Renner’s exhausted jokey aplomb is pure Bruce Willis-as-John McClane. And just to underscore the “Die Hard” influences, it takes place against a Christmas backdrop with plenty of forced frivolity and carol singing to provide “irony.” It’s the most wonderful time of the year, after all.
“Hawkeye” streams two installments tonight and will complete its six-episode assignment on Dec. 22.
› On a similar theme, “Hanna” streams its second season on Amazon Prime. Esme Creed-Miles stars as a genetically altered super soldier raised in Polish exile by a CIA operative. How cozy! This story was the basis of the 2011 film of the same name starring Saoirse Ronan.
› AMC anticipates Thanksgiving with six helpings of the 1987 comedy “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” (6 p.m. to 2 a.m., AMC, TV-PG). This wistful tale, starring Steve Martin and John Candy, is arguably the only “Thanksgiving movie” to have become a yearly tradition. The characters’ desperate efforts to get home for the holiday unfold like an anxiety dream, revealing their complicated relationships to the folks they call loved ones.
› Viewers looking for a new Thanksgiving movie tradition might sample the 2021 drama “The Humans” (8 p.m., Showtime), adapted from a stage play by Steven Karam. Things take a gothic turn when three generations of a Pennsylvania family gather around
the turkey in a Manhattan apartment. This Showtime airing coincides with a limited theatrical engagement for this film, which had a brief film festival run. The cast includes Richard Jenkins, Beanie Feldstein (“Impeachment: American Crime Story”) and Amy Schumer.
› Holiday skits from the past five decades unfold on “A Saturday Night Live Thanksgiving” (9 p.m., NBC, TV-14). Fans of “SNL” alumni can catch Molly Shannon in the 1999 comedy “Superstar” (8 p.m. Cinemax), and Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler
in the 2007 skating spoof “Blades of Glory” (9:20 p.m., Cinemax).
› The emphasis on “perfect” holiday meals and decorations didn’t begin with Martha Stewart. Decades earlier, Barbara Stanwyck starred in the 1945 comedy “Christmas in Connecticut” (10 p.m., TCM, TV-G), as a magazine writer whose reputation rests on her articles about a perfectly enviable home, husband and family, all fraudulent.