‘Social Distance’ joins ‘Connecting’

With a title describing both its subject and its production, the eight-part anthology “Social Distance,” now streaming on Netflix, offers different takes on friends and family coping with quarantine, separation and the need to connect. Created by the team behind “Orange Is the New Black,” “Social” blends comedy and poignancy.

In the first helping, a Latin family connects awkwardly at the Zoom funeral for their father, a man who meant very different things to each of his children. While only 16 minutes long, it explores the siblings’ relationships with each other and with their parents, contains a major revelation about the dear departed and even manages to make a few jokes about the shortcomings of Zoom and funeral home directors.

It’s a good contrast to “Connecting” (8 p.m., NBC, TV-PG), another quarantine-based series that puts a sitcom spin on social isolation. Desperate to associate itself with NBC’s comedy tradition, “Connecting” had two characters extol their love of “Cheers” in the first episode, even though they look like they couldn’t have been born before the show aired its finale.

› You can’t call a show a whodunit when you know the killer in the first 10 minutes. But that doesn’t stop “Des” from becoming one of the more intriguing character studies of the year. Streaming on Sundance Now, it stars David Tennant (“Doctor Who,” “Broadchurch”) as the notorious serial killer Dennis Nilsen, who preyed upon London’s demimonde of homeless runaways and drug addicts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period when hippie vagabond culture ran into the buzzsaw of Thatcher-era unemployment.

The series shows Nilsen under investigation by police, who appear dumbfounded by the audacity of his actions and sheer number of his victims. They also fall under the spell of his sociopathic “sympathy” for his prey and his ability to identify with the detectives, because, (spoiler alert) he was once a member of the force.

Nilsen also engages in dark mind games with writer Brian Masters (Jason Watkins), who becomes his confessor and official biographer. If Watkins looks familiar, it’s because he’s on a bit of a winning streak, having appeared as Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the third season of “The Crown” and as a member of Parliament in the stellar miniseries “A Very English Scandal” on Amazon.

› Cast members Rob Lowe, Dule Hill, Allison Janney, Janel Moloney, Richard Schiff, Bradley Whitford, Anna Deavere Smith and Martin Sheen reunite for a benefit stage reading of a 2002 episode on “A West Wing Special to Benefit When We All Vote,” streaming on HBO Max.

Writer/creator Aaron Sorkin and executive producer/director Thomas Schlamme will participate as well.