NBC’s latest lemon previewed tonight
What kinds of series are showcased in the days leading up to Christmas? In most cases, it’s exactly the kinds of series that are launched in the early days of the New Year: bad shows, misbegotten concepts poorly conceived or executed or both. All of those negatives apply to “American Auto” (10 p.m. and 10:30 p.m., NBC, TV-14), receiving a sneak preview tonight.
“Auto” is set in the offices of a long-established car company Payne Motors, where Katherine Hastings (Ana Gasteyer), a former big pharma hotshot, has been brought aboard as CEO, much to the chagrin of Wesley (Jon Barinholtz), a Payne family descendent who feels overlooked.
Conceived by “Superstore” creator Justin Spitzer, the dialogue trades in all the knuckleheaded, self-delusional patter of that workplace comedy. But what might be funny among clerks at a big-box store seems peculiar at a company where manufacturing, engineering and design are paramount. Hastings’ arrival provides an opportunity for some satire of contemporary corporate culture. She knows nothing about cars and could care less. But none of the other characters are convincing as car people, either. Sitcoms with so much built-in contempt for their situation and setting tend to flounder. I don’t expect “American Auto” to get out of park.
› Should the government be in the business of developing and underwriting TV shows, even educational series? And if a show was so funded and founded, wouldn’t it be seen as dull propaganda?
The first half-hour of the 2021 documentary “Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street” (10 p.m., HBO) describes how the series was born as an idea hatched during the Johnson administration’s “Great Society” years and supported by the Department of Education to help improve reading skills among innercity children, most of them minorities.
Supported with government money, the nonprofit organization the Children’s Television Workshop, under Joan Ganz Cooney, spent years researching ways to use the power of television and particularly
television advertising to bombard kids with catchy jingles about counting numbers and learning their ABCs.
The bulk of this enjoyable, nearly two-hour film is about three principal architects of the “Sesame Street” we came to know: writer/director/producer Jon Stone; musical composer Joe Raposo and master puppeteer Jim Henson, who all worked around-theclock to make hundreds of magical episodes.
For each of them, “Sesame Street” was the dream job of a lifetime, and the “Street” they created has long outlived them. Henson died in 1990 at 53; Raposo at 51 in 1989 and Stone died in 1997, just before his 65th birthday.
› Unabashedly “cozy,”
“English” and “sentimental,” the U.K. import “The Larkins” begins streaming on Acorn. An adaptation of a 1950s comedy of the same name based on an H.E. Bates novel called “The Darling Buds of May,” it follows the large family of gentleman farmer Pop Larkin (Bradley Walsh) in 1950s Kent.
Not unlike the new iteration of “All Things Great and Small” on PBS, the accent is on gorgeous landscape, children, animals, traditional architecture and romantic entanglements and misunderstandings. British critics have described it as “Like a warm hug.” Help yourself.