FRIDAY’S BEST PICKS
8 PM ( MAX) MOVIE Us Writer- director Jordan Peele followed up the Oscarwinning success he achieved in his 2017 breakout blockbuster “Get Out” with this 2019 chiller, another gripping horror yarn. Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong’o stars as an emotionally fragile wife and mother whose vacation with her upper middle-class family is disrupted by a family of unhinged, red-clad doppelgangers who seem inexplicably driven to punish the vacationers for some unknown transgression. Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, Evan Alex and Shahadi Wright Joseph also star.
8 PM ( SHO) MOVIE Waves Trey Edward Shults wrote, directed, produced and co-edited this shattering 2019 drama, which received only a limited release in theaters yet earned widespread critical acclaim, including being named one of the year’s 10 best movies by the National Board of Review. Set in South Florida, the film stars Kelvin Harrison
Jr. (“Godfather of Harlem”) as Tyler Williams, a popular high school athlete whose father, Ronald (Sterling K. Brown, “This Is Us”), constantly pressures him to excel. Lucas Hedges, Taylor Russell and Renée Elise Goldsberry also star.
9 PM ^ Great Performances at the Met “Porgy and Bess,” George Gershwin’s towering American opera about life on Catfish Row, a black tenement in Charleston, S.C., comes to thrilling life in this critically acclaimed production staged by James Robinson, with David Robertson conducting. Eric Owens and Angel Blue take the title roles of Porgy, a crippled beggar, and Bess, the beautiful woman he loves; the enormous cast also includes Frederick Ballentine as the drug dealer Sportin’ Life, with other roles filled by Denyce Graves, Golda Schultz, Latonia Moore and Alfred Walker.
9 PM ( WE) Love After Lockup This hit reality series returns for its third season featuring new couples, usually a blend of one smitten lovebird hoping to tie the knot with a sweetheart behind bars and the latter jailbird who may or may not be conning the sweetheart on the outside. This season’s couples include Shawn and Destinie, who clicked online while she’s behind bars. They’ve never met in person, but Shawn’s fully committed. Now he just has to break the news to the mother of his six children. 10 PM ( AMC) Friday Night In with The Morgans Production on Season 10 of AMC’s hit series “The Walking Dead” was shuttered by the coronavirus pandemic, but one of the show’s stars, Jeffrey
Dean Morgan, has made good use of his downtime hosting this low-key but delightful half-hour weekly talk show while quarantined with actress-wife Hilarie Burton Morgan on their upstate New York farm. Tonight’s finale marks the end of their 12 episodes, as the couple catches up remotely with Morgan’s “Dead” co-star Lauren Cohan. 10:15 PM ( TCM) MOVIE The Grapes of Wrath The fact that Henry Fonda didn’t win an Oscar for his work in this 1940 drama is almost as criminal as the injustices committed against the bedraggled migrant laborers of the story. Even his most devoted fans forget they’re watching Fonda, so thoroughly does he transform himself into the bloody-but-unbowed Tom Joad. The film, based on John Steinbeck’s novel, did earn two Oscars: for best supporting actress (Jane Darwell) and best director (John Ford).