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Michaela Coel’s acclaimed series ends its first season. And the American edition of a British dating exhibition is back.
By Peter Libbey
LOVE ISLAND 8:00 p.m. CBS. The American spin-off of the British dating exhibition returns for a moment tonight with a two-hour premiere. Presenter Arielle Vandenberg welcomes a new cast of single men and women to a secluded place where they will live in a combination nearby under the watchful eye of the many cameras on the screen. For this episode, participants will be abducted at the Cromwell Hotel in Las Vegas, not at an exotic foreign site, due to the coronavirus pandemic, which also delayed the start of the season. A provisional pairing will begin, and then the competition will be paired with each of the following cross-sectional rites to remain in the contest for the $100,000 prize. They will also have to take a look at the audience and their “islander” colleagues, whose votes determine who leaves.
I CAN DESTROY YOU nine p.m. on HBO; broadcast on HBO platforms. The first season of Michaela Coel’s critically acclaimed series about a promising writer’s delight with sexual assault ends with a cathartic ending. Plagued by rape flashbacks, but also frustrated by the shortcomings of her memory – she had been drugged before the attack – Arabella (Coel) was trapped in a terrible state of limbo while trying to heal herself from her terrible experience. This week he returns to his reminiscence of that night and has the opportunity to solve some of the remaining core mysteries. But Arabella’s move toward rehabilitation and reconciliation is not limited to her attack. As Mike Hale noted in his review for The Times, “the genuine theme of the exhibition is Arabella’s progress in regaining its reminiscence in every space of her life.” Coel, he writes, is at the end “less interested in an orderly solution than in the story Arabella is building.”
JOHN MCENROE: TO THE ROYAUME PERFECTION (2018) Transmission on Criterion Channel and Kanopy; Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube. Like all wonderful athletes, John McEnroe transcended his game even when he was about to get over it. This documentary, based on 16-millimeter photographs of McEnroe vying for the name Roland Garros in 1984, captures the intensity and artistic skill that separated the American master from his contemporaries with similar abilities. Narrated through French actor Mathieu Amalric, the film also serves as a mirror image of how cinema captures moving bodies and how an individual’s spirit can outperform the body, even on the occasion of defeat.
FAMILY ASSEMBLY Broadcast on Acorn TV. Whenever the law and the circle of relatives cross paths, headaches are inevitable. In this French series set in Lyon, Audrey (Ophelia Kolb) and her mother, Astrid (Catherine Marchal), attempt to overlay those two conflicting spaces as colleagues in Astrid’s cabinet. To succeed, they will have to act as effective lawyers while still being in touch with the complex truth of their clients’ family circle. Negotiating their dual prestige as colleagues and as a mother and daughter requires finding an equally sensitive balance.
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