What’s on TV Sunday: ‘The Orville’ and ‘Selection Day’
Seth MacFarlane’s “Star Trek” sendup returns to Fox. And an adaptation of an Aravind Adiga novel debuts on Netflix.
What’s on TV
THE ORVILLE eight p.m. on Fox. When this collection debuted final yr, it marked a little bit of a departure for Seth MacFarlane, the “Family Guy” funnyman. The high-energy, animated vulgarity of that present and MacFarlane’s “American Dad” is dialed down right here, changed with drier humor and a heavy serving to of “Star Trek” — which is being parodied. MacFarlane performs the captain of a spaceship and crew in uniforms who shoot blasters that may mix proper in at a Trekkie conference. In his evaluation of the primary season for The New York Times, Mike Hale wrote that the present “emulates the original ‘Trek’ series to a degree somewhere between sincere homage and creepy necrophilia.” It returns for a second season after a yearlong hiatus.
SPACE JAM (1996) 10 p.m. on VH1. This quintessential ’90s children film locations an animated Bugs Bunny alongside Michael Jordan. Danny DeVito voices the dangerous man.
What’s Streaming
SELECTION DAY on Netflix. In his 2016 novel, “Selection Day,” the writer Aravind Adiga (who won the Man Booker Prize in 2008 for “The White Tiger”) explored the lives of a pair of brothers living in a Mumbai slum. They’re raised under the domineering eye of their father, who is set on his sons becoming cricket stars; anything else is, to him, a distraction. Netflix has adapted the novel into an original series, which debuts Sunday.
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: THE RADIANT CHILD (2010) on Amazon, iTunes and Mubi. A few years before his premature death of a heroin overdose in 1988, the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was filmed by the director Tamra Davis in a rare interview, by Becky Johnson. That footage wasn’t released at the time. Davis ended up using it as the centerpiece of this documentary profile of the artist, which also has interviews with some of Basquiat’s peers, like the artist Julian Schnabel. In his review for The Times, Stephen Holden wrote that the film “places Basquiat’s art in a cultural context with an enthusiasm and zest that make the many pictures shown come blazingly alive.”
EATING ANIMALS (2018) on Hulu. Natalie Portman is now on movie theater screens in Brady Corbet’s “Vox Lux,” a film that addresses two complicated elements of modern American life: mass shootings and pop stars. In “Eating Animals,” she takes on a third: factory farming. Following in the footsteps of “Food, Inc.” and Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation,” Christopher Dillon Quinn’s documentary adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2009 book — with Portman as a narrator — forces audiences to think about where their food comes from. In his review for The Times, Ben Kenigsberg wrote that the film skewers factory farming “from philosophical, epidemiological and even economic perspectives.” He noted that “it seems impossible to come away from it without wanting to know more about where your meat comes from.” It hits Hulu right in time to inspire New Year’s resolutions.
