‘Grown-ish’ goes back to school
Zoey returns to her campus haunts to help Junior settle in as a freshman as “Grown-ish” (10 p.m., Freeform, TV-14) enters its fifth season. The series’ single-camera documentary style, when mixed with the frequent use of voice-overs for little more than one-liners, does not add to a sense of realism, but instead makes the comedy seem more slick and plastic than the most conventional three-camera comedy.
Along with the new Brooklyn-based blogger comedy “Everything’s Trash” (10:30 p.m., Freeform, TV-14), this “-ish” spinoff pushes the boundaries of basic cable sensibilities. At one point, we burst into a bathroom where college students are having sex, featuring full pixelation.
That wouldn’t happen on HBO, and the makers of “Grown-ish” want you to know it. But if it’s going to be bowdlerized, why show it at all? It’s a little like the days when a local network or the old AMC would broadcast “Goodfellas” and bleep out all of the profanities, or worse, substitute absurd phrases for the “bad” words.
As I mentioned last week in my thoughts on “Trash,” it’s often more difficult to avoid the obvious and to discuss “adult” matters with innuendo and code. You may be working under a kind of repression, but the results are often more memorable. That’s why PG episodes of “Frasier” hold up after 30 years and why we’re still humming Cole Porter songs a century after they were composed.
› Fans of the recent “Elvis” epic and director Baz Luhrmann’s overwrought musical style may want to (re)visit the 2001 musical “Moulin Rouge!” (6:45 p.m., Starz Encore). It features 1890s characters (Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor) bursting into late 20th-century pop songs by Queen, Madonna and Elton John, among others.
Luhrmann would later inject a hip-hop sensibility into a 2013 adaptation of “The Great Gatsby.” His limited television series “The Get Down” (2016) attempted to chronicle the rap scene’s earliest stirrings, and along the way offered a lavish recreation of the South Bronx at its 1970s nadir.
An ambitious and quite apparently expensive production, “The Get Down” was canceled by Netflix after only one season, a sign that even that streaming service — at the height of its influence and affluence — had some limits, and that Luhrmann’s vision was clearly beyond them.
Speaking of Netflix and vast budgets, it’s only two days until the streaming debut of “The Gray Man,” an action thriller produced for Netflix and now in theaters, that is said to have cost some $200 million. Set your alarm clocks!
› The notion of “media bias” has been around for a while. Dana Andrews plays a returning Korean War veteran who discovers that the publicity firm that hired him has been taken over by Communists who give their “middle of the road” stories a pro-Moscow spin in the 1958 film noir drama “The Fearmakers” (1:45 p.m., TCM), directed by Jacques Tourneur (“Cat People”). Look for Mel Torme in a minor role.