Home / Arts & Life / What’s on TV Thursday: ‘George Best: All by Himself’ and ‘Atlanta’

What’s on TV Thursday: ‘George Best: All by Himself’ and ‘Atlanta’

Photo

A scene from “George Best: All by Himself.”

Credit
ESPN Films

The series “30 for 30” remembers soccer’s first pop icon, the Manchester United player George Best, before that team faces Manchester City. And you can restream “Atlanta,” Donald Glover’s Emmy-nominated rags-and-riches comedy.

What’s on TV

GEORGE BEST: ALL BY HIMSELF 8:30 p.m. on ESPN. Flamboyant, charismatic and a dazzling dribbler, the Irish soccer player Mr. Best made his electrifying debut with Manchester United at 17 and quickly became the sport’s first pop icon. But his life, as recounted in this “30 for 30” documentary, was a roller coaster — from being named the European Player of the Year in 1968 to withdrawing from a game against Spain in Northern Ireland because of death threats from the Irish Republican Army. Off the field, he lived in a mansion under police protection to keep the women away; employed a full-time staff to answer the 10,000 fan letters he received each week; and struggled with alcohol abuse. And when he died in November 2005, at 59, a quarter of a million people lined the route of his funeral cortege. MANCHESTER UNITED VS. MANCHESTER CITY, held at NRG Stadium in Houston, will follow at 10 on ESPN and ESPN Deportes.

What’s Streaming

Photo

Zazie Beetz and Donald Glover in “Atlanta.”

Credit
Quantrell Colbert/FX

ATLANTA on FXNow. Donald Glover created this FX series and racked up Emmy nominations for outstanding comedy, directing, writing and lead actor for his portrayal of Earn Marks. A technically homeless Princeton dropout, Earn becomes the manager of his rapper cousin Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), while trying to prove to Van (Zazie Beetz), the mother of his baby daughter, that he can cut it as a father and provider. “Dry and offbeat, with an immediate, original voice, this comedy is a back-roads drive through the expansive territory between rags and riches,” James Poniewozik wrote in The New York Times. “It’s a delight to find ‘Atlanta,’ an idiosyncratic hangout with a crew whose members, in a genre that lionizes making it big, would be glad to make it medium.”

THE BUREAU on Sundance Now. Malotru, the French spy played by Mathieu Kassovitz, is somewhere in Syria after escaping his Islamic State captors with the help of a Russian mole. But that can’t stop Duflot (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) from taking early retirement to assure Malotru’s safety. Afterward, watch die-hard fans converse over cocktails in “NOW THE DISCUSSION.”

Photo

Tilda Swinton in “I Am Love.”

Credit
Magnolia Pictures

I AM LOVE (2010) on iTunes and Netflix. Tilda Swinton, as the wife of a Milanese textile manufacturer, awakens to life’s possibilities when she begins an affair with a young chef. Edoardo Gabbriellini is the sensitive beefcake in whose hands food is an aphrodisiac in Luca Guadagnino’s film, which Manohla Dargis, writing in The Times, called a “soaringly beautiful melodrama.”

BLACK WIDOW on Walter Presents. This Dutch crime series has been compared to “The Sopranos” — “if Tony got whacked in Episode 1, and Carmela took over,” as an article in The Times put it. Monic Hendrickx stars as Carmen van Walraven, a mother of three who assumes control of her assassinated husband’s crime ring. To protect the children, naturally.

Continue reading the main story

About admin

Check Also

Hear the Best Albums and Songs of 2023

Dear listeners, In the spirit of holiday excess and end-of-the-year summation, we’re about to make …