Top 5 TV: Addicts, Virgins and the Greatest Baseball Inning Ever
Tracy Morgan returned to Saturday Night Live this past weekend for the first time since his debilitating car accident, and it was a glorious thing to behold. Even beyond seeing the former SNL star do comedy again — surrounded at one point, poignantly, by his old 30 Rock castmates — the episode as a whole was a reminder that life is short, and maybe it’s better to spend whatever TV time we have left watching people we already know we like. And that includes you, Larry David, who kicked off the show with a Bernie Sanders impression so spot-on and funny that Republicans and Hillary Clinton supporters may pull for the Vermont Senator to stick around for a while, just for the jokes.
This week’s installment of Top Five TV is crowded with familiar faces, including three of last year’s best hour-long series: a comic romp, a grim drama, and the other something somewhere in between. And like nearly everyone who watches sports, we feel obliged to say a few words about the strangest, most riveting inning of baseball to be broadcast in eons. This is the kind of month it’s been. Nearly everything new has been hugely disappointing. But the old standbys? They’re still good. Like Larry-David-as-Bernie-Sanders good.
5. Jane the Virgin makes a melodramatic — and milky — return (The CW)
Throughout its first season, this meta-telenovela served up gangsters, romantic betrayals, kidnappings, and the financial health of one messed-up Miami resort hotel. And now the show hits viewers with something really major: Jane Villanueva’s struggle to breastfeed her newborn son. Last week’s “Chapter Twenty-Three” has everything JtV fans love, from the laser-focused vanity of our heroine’s celebrity dad to self-aware commentary/narration.
But the episode is also serious when it matters. Head writer Jennie Snyder Urman deals truthfully with the emotional stress and old wives’ tales that accompany Jane’s lactation anxiety; and then when the milk finally flows, it’s semi-comically framed as a miracle. The show has always finessed the difficult trick of poking fun of soap opera conventions while simultaneously using them to explain/explore the complicated life of smart, young, working-class Latinas. Crazy crises may be piling up already, but Jane understands that the series’ heart is in the everyday troubles, the kind where the outcome’s anything but certain.