‘La Brea’ enters its final season
If you’re going to make a ridiculous show, why bother with half measures? It says something that the third and final season of “La Brea” (9 p.m., NBC, TV-14) arrives just a night after the celebration of the 60th anniversary of “General Hospital.” This hokey time-traveling mind-bender has more than its share of soap opera elements and whiffs of “Lost” episodes and “Star Wars”-inspired “I am your father” moments.
Of course, any group that bounces back and forth between 10,000 B.C., 1988 and the present is going to run into people who may or may not be your dear old Mom and Dad. “Back to the Future” did that better.
Maybe I’m prejudiced. Or just cranky. La Brea” presents a visual catalog of adolescent entertainment cliches that have been driven into the ground and generally drive me from the room.
People from the present day being chased around by woolly mammoths and dinosaurs may tick all the boxes for the 12-year-old inside you, but we’ve seen it all before, in and out of “Jurassic Park.” And why must bands of survivors, cut off from all the modern conveniences, always garb themselves in fashions that I’ve come to think of as Hollywood medieval? It looked cool in “Mad Max: The Road Warrior” - over 42 years ago!!!
I’m less surprised that “La Brea” made it to a third season than I was shocked that NBC aired a second episode. But these are strange times in what used to be called television, a place where streaming has eliminated any notion of the present or the past and where series like “Suits” and “Manifest” can pop up on Netflix like sinkholes for bingers who have long lost all sense of time.
› Some films surprise you, not for their beauty or craft, but because they exist at all. “Beyond Utopia,” presented by “Independent Lens” (9 p.m., PBS, TV-MA, check local listings) is such a film.
It profiles people attempting to escape North Korea, among the most efficiently repressive places on earth, a land of near total surveillance ruled over by a totalitarian clique who work tirelessly to convince the population that they are living in a workers’ paradise, even as people face mass starvation and root through garbage dumps for means of survival. Upon escape, North Korean refugees describe being born and raised on “another planet.”
Television is filled with documentaries and series (like A&E’s “Secrets of Polygamy”) about cults and those who escape from the clutches of petty religious dictators. “Utopia” is audacious because it has been composed largely by its own subjects, people leaving North Korea in order to survive and documenting their flight at the same time.
› After the early death of a punk pioneer, her daughter seeks a clearer picture of her life, background and inspirations in the 2021 U.K. documentary “Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliche” (10 p.m., TMC). Styrene, born Marianne Joan Elliott-Said (1957-2011), and the lead singer for the X-Ray Specs, said she took her stage name from “The Yellow Pages” and because it evoked the band’s DayGlo aesthetic. Ask your grandparents what the Yellow Pages were.
OTHER HIGHLIGHTS
› White powder burns on “NCIS: Sydney” (8 p.m., CBS, TV-14).
› Sweetness abounds in the 2019 romance “Love, Romance & Chocolate” (8 p.m., Hallmark, TV-G).
› Making the mostwanted list on “FBI”
(9 p.m., CBS, repeat, TV-14).
› A masseur’s hands-on approach raises suspicions on “Caught in the Act: Unfaithful” (9 p.m., MTV, TV-14).