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What’s on TV Thursday: ‘The Bureau’ and Scarlett Johansson

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Mathieu Kassovitz as Malotru in “The Bureau.”

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Sundance Now

“The Bureau,” the smash French spy thriller starring Mathieu Kassovitz, is back with a chase through the Middle East. And Scarlett Johansson talks about her day job on “Inside the Actors Studio.”

What’s Streaming

THE BUREAU on Sundance Now. Mathieu Kassovitz (“Amélie,” “Munich”) stars as an undercover agent for the French intelligence service — code name, Malotru — who in Season 1 returned home to Paris after a six-year mission in Damascus, where he struggled to relinquish his alias as the teacher Paul Lefebvre and a forbidden affair with a married Syrian woman. The Season 3 opener finds Malotru held hostage by the Islamic State, sending his colleagues scrambling into missions in the Middle East with the ultimate purpose of retrieving him. “If Paul Lefebvre makes it back to France, it’ll be a miracle,” an American agent tells the French. “The question is: Do we believe in miracles?” Éric Rochant’s spy thriller, at once cerebral and gadget-filled, had access to the D.G.S.E., France’s equivalent of the C.I.A., and was named best TV series by the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics. New episodes will debut each Thursday. Afterward, watch die-hard fans converse over cocktails in “Now the Discussion.”

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A scene from “Force Majeure.”

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Magnolia Pictures

FORCE MAJEURE (2014) on iTunes and Amazon. An attractive Swedish couple, Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) and Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), and their two darling children embark on a ski vacation in the French Alps, where their smug contentment seems proof that they are “living the dream.” Then, as a controlled avalanche appears to run amok while they are eating lunch at an outdoor cafe, Tomas grabs his iPhone and makes a mad dash to safety, leaving his family behind. Writing in The New York Times, Stephen Holden called Ruben Ostlund’s dark comedy a “brilliant, viciously amusing takedown of bourgeois complacency, gender stereotypes and assumptions and the illusion of security.”

What’s on TV

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Scarlett Johansson

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Anthony Behar/Bravo

INSIDE THE ACTORS STUDIO 8 p.m. on Bravo. Scarlett Johansson dishes with James Lipton about her life and career, including her new movie, “Rough Night,” in which she stars as a soon-to-be-married politician on the verge of losing a state senate race who blunders into disaster during a bachelorette weekend in Miami.

BOY BAND 8 p.m. on ABC. Thirty young male vocalists audition in Los Angeles before Nick Carter of the Backstreet Boys, Emma Bunton of the Spice Girls and the producer Timbaland for a shot for a contract with Hollywood Records. The competition, hosted by Rita Ora, begins as the performers are winnowed down to 18 and then divided into three groups of six before advancing to the next round.

THE MIST 10 p.m. on Spike. A family in a small Maine town is torn apart when a lethal mist rolls in and cuts them off from the rest of the world — and each other. Christian Torpe reimagined this Stephen King story starring Morgan Spector, Alyssa Sutherland and Gus Birney. Writing in The Times, Neil Genzlinger called it “comfort food,” warning, “Just don’t expect to be challenged or electrified by it.”

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