Stream these great new TV series
MEw to MEte ox
“Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel”: Documentarian Joe Berlinger has been telling true-crime stories in film and on TV since the 1990s with projects like “Brother’s Keeper,” the “Paradise Lost” trilogy and “Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes.” His new anthology series, “Crime Scene,” is an ambitious one, examining mysteries and murder in the context of where they occurred. The four-episode first season is ostensibly about a tourist who disappeared from a seedy Los Angeles hotel in 2013. But it is also about the building itself, which has been a locus of desperation and depravity for decades.
“Kid Cosmic”: Craig McCracken, creator of “The Powerpuff Girls,” indulges in his passion for superheroes, science fiction and Saturday-morning cartoon mayhem with this new animated series. The show tells the story of a cocky preteen misfit who discovers powerful alien gemstones and distributes them among his friends in a remote New Mexico town, forming a makeshift superteam to save the Earth. Typical of McCracken’s shows, “Kid Cosmic” is frantically paced and filled with wacky humor. But it also has poignant undertones of childhood loneliness and melancholy, along with an eye-catching sense of design that draws on pulp magazines and newspaper comics.
“City of Ghosts”: An inspired mix of documentary, kiddie cartoon and avant-garde cinema, this charmingly offbeat animation is about an intrepid band of young paranormal investigators who venture into different Los Angeles neighborhoods interviewing the proprietors of local businesses and the spirits who haunt their establishments. Created by Elizabeth Ito (who has previously worked on “Phineas and Ferb” and “Adventure Time”), the series features simplified animated characters in front of photographed backgrounds, and combines scripted adventures with off-the-cuff interviews. It’s beautiful to look at, with a soft and gentle tone that may appeal even more to stressed-out adults than to children.
Teo to DAO Nap “The Investigation”:
Accomplished Danish screenwriter and director Tobias Lindholm tackles a bizarre recent true-crime story in this six-part miniseries about what happened after Swedish journalist Kim Wall’s dismembered corpse was found scattered around Koge Bay in Denmark in 2017. Lindholm doesn’t dramatize the murder, which eventually led to the arrest and conviction of an entrepreneur who had invited Wall to interview him on his submarine. Instead, he follows the two cops on the case as they doggedly pursue the gruesome clues.
MEw to HostEy+ “The Muppet Show” (Seasons 1-5):
Fans of puppeteer and filmmaker Jim Henson have been waiting awhile for his TV series “The Muppet Show” — perhaps his most enduring masterpiece — to arrive on a subscription streaming service. For five seasons and 120 episodes from 1976 to 1981, Henson and his team of writers, craftspeople and performers brought joy and whimsy to the small screen through the conceit of a low-rent variety show run by high-strung weirdos. From its catchy songs to its string of A-list guest hosts (including pretty much every big-name entertainer of the era), “The Muppet Show” helped define the popular culture of its time while always remaining family
friendly.
MEw to Bxx E NO+ “Dickinson” (Season 2):
The second season of this loopy historical dramedy has all the charms of the first, beginning with Hailee Steinfeld’s winning performance as poet Emily Dickinson, portrayed as a headstrong young woman who bucks her family’s ideas of respectable femininity. The clever hook is that while it is set in the
distant past, the characters behave as if they are in a modern suburban TV household. Season 2 opens with an admission that the historical record is vague on this phase of the writer’s life (a period not long after her brother married the woman Dickinson loved), but that doesn’t stop the show’s creators from using her poems as a window into her daily romantic despair.