Netflix’s ‘Black Mirror’; Bob Hope on PBS
Anthology series are back. This year saw several new shows that offered episodes as standalone stories. HBO’s “Room 104” and TBS’ “The Guest Book” are both set in motels. Amazon’s “Lore” adapted a podcast into a television series to explore the origins of familiar horror stories and motifs.
Amazon also will begin streaming the anthology “Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams” on Jan. 12.
Netflix’s “Black Mirror,” the most remarkable and talked about of these anthologies, begins streaming its fourth season today.
This stylish and smart British science-fiction drama puts its emphasis on the near-future and presents mind-bending variations on the familiar.
While old anthologies like Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” and “The Outer Limits” explored midcentury Cold War fears at the dawn of the Space Age, “Black Mirror” mines widespread anxieties about what personal technology is doing to the people who use it, depend upon it and have grown addicted to its convenience.
Many of its stories consider a world where individuals submit to a collective, imaginary illusion — a place where bliss turns to nightmare and where technology “consumers” quickly lose their individuality and even their sanity.
The cast and stories may change, but “Black Mirror” remains consistently smart and engaging.
DUAL ROLES
On a completely unrelated note, another vintage TV trope returned in 2017: the star actor playing his own identical twin. I’m not talking about a remake of “The Patty Duke Show.” In 2017, Ewan McGregor portrayed identical twins in the third installment of “Fargo,” and James Franco played twin brothers in “The Deuce.” One pair of matching bookends, as different as night and day.
HOPE’S GENIUS
PBS offers an expanded director’s cut of the “American Masters” (9 p.m., TV-PG) episode, “This Is Bob Hope.”
It’s hardly surprising that “Hope” reminded this viewer of another “American Masters” biography of Bing Crosby. Both men were stars of many mediums, including vaudeville, radio, movies and television. Hope was also a hit on Broadway while Crosby was a hugely popular recording artist. Both men lived long enough to see their popularity decline, rejected by an emerging generation that saw them as slightly square, young people born too late to have seen them when they were revolutionizing their fields.
“Hope” takes great effort to show how its subject all but invented stand-up comedy. His rapid-fire riffs on news and politics were something he virtually invented when appearing as a vaudeville master of ceremony and radio star. The comic monologue associated with Johnny Carson and his successors would not exist without Hope.
The profile also makes much of Hope and Crosby’s “Road” movies and their almost postmodern take on screen comedy. The actors made jokes about appearing in a movie while in character, a break in the fourth wall that winked at their audience and invited them to follow two “hip” guys on the “Road” to just about anywhere.
This thorough profile takes a full hour to get to Hope’s first wartime tour to entertain troops, the role and the audience that would define him for the last five decades of his life.
OTHER HIGHLIGHTS
› The 1987 Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell comedy “Overboard” (7 p.m., Pop) turns 30 this year. I may be wrong, but it seems to have aired on cable every day for the past three decades. It debuted on Dec. 16, 1987.
› Fish sets the agenda on a two-hour helping of “Hell’s Kitchen” (8 p.m., Fox, repeat, TV-14).
› Ryan Seacrest hosts the second night of the “iHeartRadio Music Festival” (8 p.m., CW, repeat, TV-14).
› Linda’s brother crosses some tough guys on “Blue Bloods” (10 p.m., CBS, repeat, TV-14).
› New details of the deadly 1993 Waco, Texas, standoff on “48 Hours” (8 p.m. CBS repeat, TV-14).
› An intel leak on “MacGyver” (9 p.m. CBS, repeat, TV-14).
› Mood swings on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” (8 p.m., NBC, repeat, TV-14).
› A lot to get behind on “Shark Tank” (8 p.m., ABC, repeat, TV-PG).
› “Dateline” (9 p.m., NBC).
› Two episodes of “20/20” (9 p.m. and 10 p.m., ABC).
Contact Kevin McDonough at kevin.tvguy@gmail.com.