No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every Friday for new suggestions from our TV critic on what to watch.
This Weekend I Have … an Hour, and I Love a Chubby Puppy
‘My Big Fat Pet Makeover’
When to watch: Saturday at 10 p.m., on Animal Planet.
Oh my God, these dogs are so fat. Paddy is a Pomeranian who once weighed 34 pounds, which is about triple what he’s supposed to weigh. Luckily this show is very gentle and nonjudgmental — it’s focused on giving one’s pet a happy and agile life going forward, rather than on scolding the owners who, for example, fed their beagle five times as much as he is supposed to eat in a day.
… an Hour, and I Like Los Angeles Stories
‘10 Days in the Valley’
When to watch: Sunday at 10 p.m., on ABC.
Kyra Sedgwick stars as a Jane, a documentary filmmaker who’s now paying the bills as the showrunner on a cop show. She’s awake in the middle of the night in her back shed, doing coke and writing last-minute scripts, when her young daughter disappears from inside. Jane is wildly unsympathetic as a lead character, and the Hollywood side of the show veers toward soapy, which makes this a bit juicer and less wrenching than other missing-kid shows.
I am, in general, pretty tired of “isn’t showbiz so bad?” stories because they rarely tell us anything we don’t already know. Had you heard that sleazy people are sleazy? In fact, I have heard this. Mercifully, “10 Days” is at least self-aware rather than high and mighty about its show-within-a-show. (I’m looking at you, Netflix’s “Love.”) It’s all part of the show’s contemptuous vibe. No one likes anyone else nor appears to like much of anything.
There’ a strong current of rich-people problems to the series — Jane’s housekeeper and her gardener and her assistant have keys to her house! — so if you like shows like “The Affair” or “Big Little Lies,” but with a more tamed, network vibe, try this.
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… an Hour, and Anxiety Is a Virtue
‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’
When to watch: Sunday at 10 p.m., on HBO.
“Curb” hasn’t aired a new episode since 2011, but at long last, Larry David and company are back for 10 more episodes of awkward misunderstandings, shouting, romantic miscues and rigid rules around peccadilloes. The show helped refine what we think of as the modern comic style — single camera, personality-driven, ambivalent about likability, comfortable with discomfort — and its return puts it in the unusual category of both progenitor and contemporary.