This October, the 13th falls on a Thursday, providing the perfect opportunity to see The Watcher, a terrifying Netflix limited series. Films like High Noon and On the Waterfront, as well as a short documentary, will be shown on Turner Classic Movies in honour of the 75th anniversary of the Hollywood Blacklist. One of the most exciting episodes of Atlanta is yet to air on FX, and it all centres on a search for rare shoes that quickly go off the rails. The Chicago attorneys in The Good Fight, another show in its last season, spend their days off battling bureaucracy.
The Watcher
Producer Ryan Murphy, fresh off the success of Dahmer, presents another terrifying limited series based on a real tale, this time starring Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale as the owners of a suburban New Jersey dream house that quickly turns into a living nightmare. Jennifer Coolidge (The White Lotus), the winner of an Emmy, plays a strange real estate agent whose quirky neighbours include the likes of Margo Martindale, Mia Farrow, Richard Kind, and Terry Kinney. After getting letters from a mystery “The Watcher” who seems to be following the couple wherever they go, the situation becomes even more unsettling.
High Noon On The Waterfront
The Watcher: TCM presents an impressionistic documentary short imagining a conversation between blacklisted High Noon screenwriter Carl Foreman (voiced by Edward Norton) and On the Waterfront director Elia Kazan (voiced by John Turturro) to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Hollywood Blacklist, in which many careers (actors, screenwriters, directors, and more) were sidelined due to suspicion of being a Communist or sympathiser during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and ‘ Following the 14-minute feature are showings of High Noon from 1952 (8:30/7:30c) and On the Waterfront from 1954 (10:30/9:30c).
The Grammys have moved Nicki Minaj’s “Super Freaky Girl” from the rap category to the pop one.
Atlanta
The latter episodes of the last season have been fantastic, providing both comedic relief and unexpected plot twists that may cause you to exclaim. This episode, written by Stephen Glover and directed by Hiro Murai, features Donald Glover and LaKeith Stanfield as Earn and Darius, respectively, who go out to buy a pair of rare shoes but end up with a lot more. How low would they go for a few cheap thrills? Is this something we can do with pride? Make a fortune. Another, more sinister plotline involves Paper Boi/Alfred (the excellent Brian Tyree Henry), who starts to worry for his safety when an old “Crank Dat” video is discovered. In retrospect, he should have been more cautious.
The Good Fight
The Chicago attorneys on The Good Wife spinoff, also in its last weeks, provide their full support for Ri’chard (Andre Braugher), who is trying to rescue his sickle cell anaemic nephew, age 11, on their day off, Saturday. When the boy’s bone marrow donor abruptly backs out and a groundbreaking gene-editing clinical study refuses to admit him because he is a few months too young, the family must traverse a bureaucratic maze of obstacles. I often forget how much we like watching these legal eagles in action until the season is finished.