CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: LIAM DANIEL/HBO; ALEX BAILEY/EPIX; CARA HOWE/NETFLIX; ED ARAQUEL/AMC
Harris confronts
the Soviet
government’s
failures.LAST CALLCHAIN REACTION
Chernobyl
NETWORK HBO
AIR DATE Available now
$With our present-day world on
fire, you might think a miniseries
revisiting the 1986 meltdown of
a Soviet Union nuclear reactor is
too much added horror to ponder.
Chernobyl doesn’t flinch from the
gruesome realities of the situation,
particularly for the first respond-
ers who had no idea how terribly
they’d die from radiation. But
rather than a miserable wallow, it
is a thrilling, often inspiring tale
of the heroic sacrifices made to
prevent the tragedy from swallow-
ing Eastern Europe whole. As a sci-
entist butting his head against the
ignorance of the Soviet empire,
Jared Harris has never been more
sorrowfully noble. Stellan Skars-
gård nearly matches him, as a
bureaucrat shocked to realize how
little he knows. Each of the five
episodes skillfully balances the
ghastly effects of the meltdown
with the ingenious methods de-
vised to minimize its impact. Don’t
flinch from this one. Run toward it
with reckless abandon.WATCH LIST
A Beacon
Fades to
‘Black’
as a spy, and the family is packed
off to sleep in filthy stables while
the government figures out what
to do with them. As Chester dis-
covers that American citizenship
doesn’t guarantee American
rights, the community is beset by
shape-shifting spirits from the old
country who’ve chosen an oppor-
tune time to stalk new prey. In the
early going, the real-life nightmare
is the more compelling one. But
two seasons in, The Terror has
proved a potent combination of
what scares us in our imaginations
and what should scare us in the
world outside our windows.US VS. THEM
The Terror: Infamy
NETWORK AMC
AIR DATE August 12th, 9 p.m.
#George Takei was five when his
family was forced from their Cal-
ifornia home and sent to live in a
series of internment camps for theduration of World War II. Their only
crime: being Japanese in the wake
of Pearl Harbor. As this shameful
period of national history repeats
itself with the Trump administra-
tion’s border detention centers,
Takei makes a timely return to
the subject with a supporting
role in AMC’s horror anthology
The Terror: Infamy. Like the first
season, the new tale — created
by Alexander Woo and Max Born-
stein — is a mix of historical and
supernatural horror. It’s December
1941, and college student Chester
Nakayama (Derek Mio) feels fully
assimilated into the American
dream. When his fisherman father,
Henry (Shingo Usami), cowers in
fear of racist treatment by white
authorities, Chester assures him,
“People don’t think that way
anymore.” Then bombs drop on
Pearl Harbor, Henry is interrogatedLONDON CALLING
Pennyworth
NETWORK Epix
AIR DATE Sundays, 9 p.m.
3As Orange Is the New Black
heads into its seventh and final
season, we look back at how it
changed the course of TVTHOUGH “HOUSE of Cards”
preceded it, the women’s prison
drama Orange Is the New Black
feels like the first series explicitly
designed for the streaming era:
a sprawling, fluid story with a
seemingly endless, varied supply
of female characters. We began
our journey with Piper (Taylor
Schilling), a privileged white
woman meant to stand in for
the average Netflix viewer. But
as she struggled to stay afloat
and figure out what to do about
the ex who ratted her out (Laura
Prepon’s Alex), Orange explored
and empathized with women
of color and/or varying sexual
and gender identities, people
to whom neither Piper nor tele-
vision had given much thought
in the past. Early on, Piper feels
terrorized by “Crazy Eyes” (Uzo
Aduba), who would soon be re-
vealed as a mentally ill but kind
person named Suzanne. There
was Taystee (Danielle Brooks,
magnificent) and her doomed
best friend, Poussey (Samira
Wiley), whose crush on Taystee
went unrequited. Everywhere
you looked — trans hairdresser
Sophia (Laverne Cox), junkie
Nicky (Natasha Lyonne), prag-
matic Gloria (Selenis Levya), re-
formed bigot Pennsatucky (Taryn
Manning), deceptively brilliant
Blanca (Laura Gómez) — the
characters proved complex and
tragic. With so many people to
follow, it was easy to ignore the
more annoying figures (Piper in-
cluded). At times, Orange grew
too ambitious for its own good.
But this final season (July 26th) is
a wonderful farewell, particularly
in dramatizing the monstrous
partnership between ICE and
privatized prisons. No one else
would have tried Orange before
Netflix got in the game. It casts a
long shadow over the shows that
have followed. A.S.Dascha
Polanco (left)
and BrooksWhat to stream, what to skip this monthTakei goes
back in
time.Bannon as
a pre-butler
PennyworthThe world needed a series about
how Alfred Pennyworth (Jack Ban-
non) grew up to be Batman’s butler
as much as it needs one about the
tailor who sells Bruce Banner all
those purple pants. But to its cred-
it, Pennyworth — from Gotham
creator Bruno Heller and director
Danny Cannon — doesn’t partic-
ularly care about filling in blanks
of the Bat mythos, even though
Bruce Wayne’s father, Thomas (Ben
Aldridge), keeps crossing paths
with his future manservant. Rather,
it’s using the connection to a
brand as an excuse to tell spy sto-
ries in a cracked-mirror vision of
Swinging Sixties London. Military
vet Alfred — Alfie to his friends,
lest you miss the echoes of young
Michael Caine — gets caught
in the middle of rival plots to
overthrow the British government,
complete with public executions,
one villain missing a nose, and
another who’s a dominatrix. The
series is heavier on style than on
substance, but at least it’s trying
something new in a saturated
comic-book TV market. A.S.