WATCH LIST
What to stream, what to skip this month
ABOUT A BOY
Chad
NETWORK TBS AIR DATE April 6th
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This comedy, in which Saturday Night Live alum Nasim Pedrad plays an Iranian American teenage boy, has been stuck in development for years. That gives the Pedrad-created series the awful timing to debut after two great seasons of Hulu’s Pen15, whose adult stars play themselves as adolescent girls. But Chad would be unbearable even if it had the benefit of novelty. Pen15 can be tough to sit through when it acknowledges just how awkward kids can be in middle school, but it ultimately has huge affection and empathy for its faux teens. Chad, on the other hand, seems to have nothing but contempt for its title character, who says and does the wrong thing in every situation, then finds ways to keep doing that again and again. Pedrad disappears into the role physically; too bad she can’t stand to like Chad even a little.
GHOST WORLD
Them: Covenant
NETWORK Amazon Prime
AIR DATE April 9th
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In the debut season of a new horror anthology series, African American couple Lucky (Deborah Ayorinde) and Henry (Ashley
Thomas) move with daughters Ruby (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Gracie (Melody Hurd) into an all-white L.A. neighborhood in the Fifties — Compton, in fact, in the days before white flight. They’re beset by both the racists next door (embodied by Alison Pill’s Betty, whose creepy, unwavering smile looks like it could shatter glass) and the various ghosts that seem to be lurking in the basement. It is, in other words, the plot of the haunted
house installment of Lovecraft
Country, only stretched from one episode to 10, with all of the padding that entails — including two separate episodes devoted to backstory. In individual moments, the fiery performances by Ayorinde and Thomas make the show as disturbing as required. But the story simply isn’t built to last for so long, requiring creator Little Marvin and his collaborators to trowel on complications and extraneous subplots that wind up dulling its impact at the most potent and harrowing points. Them is also much stronger at depicting human monsters than the supernatural kind — the torment visited on the family by the Bettys of the world hits harder than the dangers posed by things that go bump in the night.
SON ALSO RISES
Invincible
NETWORK Amazon Prime AIR DATE New episodes on Fridays
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Powerful teenage sons of superheroes are big on TV, first with the CW’s Superman & Lois and now with Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman’s animated adaptation of his long-running comic. This one’s told from the point of view of the title character, a.k.a. Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun), whose father is the revered Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons). What starts out as a familiar story of a kid following dad into the family business soon gets thorny with twists. Invincible often seems confused about whether it wants to be an upbeat, all-ages adventure or something much darker, thanks to frequent profanity and excessive gore. (That’s as
far as things go, maturity-wise.) But the clean, bright visual style and the performances by Yeun, Simmons, and Sandra Oh are all winning. While shopping for a costume, Mark tells his father’s tailor, Art (Mark Hamill), that he wants something iconic; Art replies that’s “tough as hell to pull off.” Invincible isn’t quite iconic yet, but it has its charms.