Home / Arts & Life / What’s on TV Friday: Kathy Bates in ‘Disjointed,’ and ‘The Tick’ Rides Again

What’s on TV Friday: Kathy Bates in ‘Disjointed,’ and ‘The Tick’ Rides Again

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From left, Aaron Moten, Dougie Baldwin and Kathy Bates in “Disjointed.”

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Netflix

Kathy Bates trades Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story” for Chuck Lorre’s new pot comedy, and critics aren’t having it — even if the audience seems to be. “The Tick,” meanwhile, gets its third do-over.

What’s Streaming

DISJOINTED on Netflix. Kathy Bates lights up as Ruth Whitefeather Feldman, the owner of a Southern California medical marijuana dispensary whose tie-dyed activism is pitted against the business acumen of her son, Travis (Aaron Moten), a newly minted M.B.A. Ruth wants to rail against the Man; Travis wants her to grow their shop into the Walmart of cannabis. The best subplot revolves around Carter (Tone Bell), an Iraq veteran and security guard struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder. With its fake advertisements, loopy animation and Cheech and Chong ’70s vibe, this show created by Chuck Lorre and David Javerbaum is “a mess of a comedy that doesn’t feel as if it belongs anywhere,” James Poniewozik wrote in The New York Times. But the live studio audience hoots it up.

Required viewing: “HIGH MAINTENANCE,” on HBO, the big-budget makeover of Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld’s buzzy web series about the Guy (Mr. Sinclair), who delivers pot around New York City by bicycle. “This is the same wry, peripatetic series at heart, a vision of urban life as a web of stories connected by wisps of smoke,” Mr. Poniewozik wrote in The Times. The episode shot from the perspective of Gatsby, a shaggy Midwestern pooch stuck in a Queens apartment who falls for his dog walker (Yael Stone of “Orange Is the New Black”), is especially beguiling.

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Peter Serafinowicz as “The Tick.”

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Amazon Prime Video

THE TICK on Amazon. After a 1994 animated series and a 2001 live-action one, Ben Edlund has created yet a third television incarnation of his goofy, bright blue comic-book superhero, played here by Peter Serafinowicz. “Here’s a suggestion,” Mike Hale wrote in The Times. “Binge the 2001 series first. (It’s $7.99 at iTunes.) It won’t spoil your enjoyment of the new show, but the reverse might not be true.”

A GOOD YEAR (2006) on Starz on Demand. Max Skinner (Russell Crowe), an aggressive London bond trader, inherits a small vineyard from his Uncle Henry (Albert Finney) in this Ridley Scott confection. And soon enough, Max, soothed by the memories of summers spent amid the grapevines, has morphed into a bon vivant and fallen for a beautiful bistro owner (Marion Cotillard). Then a young Californian (Abbie Cornish) shows up and announces that she is his uncle’s previously unknown daughter — which would make her Henry’s true heir. “Make a reservation at an upscale French restaurant immediately after seeing the film or risk going home feeling deprived,” Stephen Holden advised in The Times.

What’s on TV

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Michael Fabiano and Sonya Yoncheva performing in “La Traviata” at the Met.

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Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

LA TRAVIATA 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Sonya Yoncheva plays the doomed courtesan Violetta in this Verdi opera, presented here by “Great Performances at the Met”; Michael Fabiano plays her lover, Alfredo. Ms. Yoncheva “sounded wonderful throughout,” Zachary Woolfe wrote in The Times.

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