Kerri Kenney-Silver (left), Marco Calvani, Tina Fey, Colman Domingo and Will Forte in season two of The Four Seasons.
Photo by Emily V. Aragones/Netflix
Happy Memorial Day to those of you reading in the U.S. The unofficial start of summer is a more-or-less official break between the end of the September-to-May TV season and the summer calendar. Our streaming world means there’s not a huge letup in the amount of shows coming our way, but there’s a marked difference in what kind of shows they are — comedies and dramas on traditional TV will be taking the next few months off, with a bunch of competitions and other unscripted shows filling the schedule.
This week is a bit of a lull before a lot of summer premieres. A couple things that are premiering — including Netflix’s The Four Seasons and HBO’s movie Miss You, Love You — are getting in under the wire for Emmy eligibility, and some others are gearing up for runs into the summer months.
I’m going to change things up some too. You’ll still get the weekly calendars from The Data Stream every Monday during the summer, but I’m going to do other things a little differently:
• This week’s network and cable ratings will probably be a day late because of the holiday, so I’ll send a combined on-air and streaming ratings newsletter on Thursday as I’ve been doing. After this week, however, I’ll send weekly linear ratings on Wednesday evenings, and depending on what (if anything) looks interesting in a given week, I might do a little more beyond the network primetime top 10 and the all-day top 20.
• Streaming ratings will get their own newsletter on Thursdays starting next week, and it will include the complete charts across series and movies, with the usual analysis and commentary.
• Weekend posts will likely come every other week, featuring a mix of data dives, essays and other things that I want to take on in more detail.
On to the calendar for last week of May.
Premieres
Monday
• 8 p.m.: World War II With Tom Hanks (History Channel): History always has a high-profile series premiere over Memorial Day, and WWII is this year’s. Tell your dads.
• 9 p.m.: Spider-Noir (MGM+): Nicolas Cage voices the Spider-Noir character in the Spider-Verse animated movies, and now he stars in a live-action take on the character, a hard-boiled private eye with Spidey powers. Episodes will run weekly on MGM+, and the full season premieres Wednesday on Prime Video (both services are owned by Amazon).
• 9 p.m.: The Many Lives of Benjamin Kyle (ID/HBO Max): A wild-sounding true-crime documentary that starts with a man claiming to suffer from a rare type of amnesia, then gets weirder and potentially dangerous for the filmmakers from there.
Wednesday
• A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (Netflix): Season two of the British YA mystery premieres. It’s based on a book series by Holly Jackson.
Thursday
• The Four Seasons (Netflix): Tina Fey, Will Forte, Colman Domingo and Co. are back for a second season of the comedy about a group of friends who gather every few months for a vacation (in a world where gas prices aren’t pushing $5 a gallon, presumably).
• Deli Boys (Hulu): The first season of this comedy, about two Pakistani-American guys (Asif Ali and Saagar Shaikh) pulled into a criminal enterprise after their dad dies, was a bit of a revelation. Season two premieres here.
• Criminal Minds: Evolution (Paramount+): Serial killers all over the place.
Friday
• Star City (Apple TV): A spinoff of For All Mankind (see the finales section below) tells the space race alt-history from the Soviet perspective. Rhys Ifans and Anna Maxwell Martin lead the cast.
• Rafa (Netflix): A four-episode documentary about tennis great Rafael Nadal.
• Brazil ‘70: The Third Star (Netflix): A scripted series about the legendary squad that brought Brazil its third World Cup in 1970.
Saturday
• 9 p.m.: Craig Ferguson: American on Purpose (CNN): The comedian and naturalized U.S. citizen traverses the country to “explore the defining ideas, and contradictions, at the heart of the United States.”
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Finales
Wednesday
• 8 p.m.: Hollywood Squares (CBS)
Friday
• For All Mankind (Apple TV): Season five ends today, and Apple has picked up a sixth and final season.
Sports, specials and movies
(Any movies below that don’t have a network or streamer listed next to them are available for rental or purchase.)
Monday
• 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT: American Music Awards (CBS/Paramount+)
Wednesday
• Kylie: Tension Tour Live (Netflix): This is either a concert movie or a behind-the-scenes-of-a-concert movie featuring Kylie Minogue. Netflix’s description is pretty vague.
Thursday
• Noon ET/9 a.m. PT: Women’s College World Series (ESPN): Four games on ESPN and ESPN2 start off the NCAA softball championship, which runs into next week.
Friday
• Propeller One-Way Night Coach (Apple TV): John Travolta directed an adaptation of his own children’s book about a boy and his mom taking a cross-country flight in the early days of commercial air travel.
• 8 p.m.: Miss You, Love You (HBO/HBO Max): Allison Janney and Andrew Rannells star as a woman making plans for her husband’s funeral and her estranged son’s assistant, who forms a bond with her. Jim Rash (Community’s Dean Pelton and an Oscar-winning screenwriter for The Descendants) wrote and directed the film, which will likely be HBO’s entrant into the best movie Emmy categories.
Sunday
• AFI Life Achievement Award: A Tribute to Eddie Murphy (Netflix): The comedy great gets a career retrospective from the American Film Institute.
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