Watchable the week of February 8, 2020

Clarice (Feb. 11, 10 p.m., Global)

The opening scenes of “Clarice” — an artful collection of flashbacks from the Buffalo Bill case as Clarice Starling, in soft focus, recaps the events for a therapist (and the audience) in her distinctive Appalachian accent — suggest an aspiration to prestige TV. 

But it reminds me a bit of what killer Hannibal Lecter said to Clarice in “The Silence of the Lambs” about her “good bag” and “cheap shoes.” Behind the gloss of a psychological drama is a fairly standard police show.

By the way, don’t look for any mention of Lecter here. Due to rights agreements involving the source Thomas Harris novels, “Clarice” doesn’t mention the iconic serial killer character by name (just as NBC’s “Hannibal” never mentioned Clarice).

The action is set in 1993, one year after the events of the Oscar-winning film that starred Jodie Foster as the FBI trainee and Anthony Hopkins as Lecter.

Serial killer Buffalo Bill is seen and referenced, and the victim whose life Clarice saved, Catherine Martin (Marnee Carpenter), is a recurring character as is her politician mother, played by Jayne Atkinson of “24” and “House of Cards.”

In fact, it’s Ruth Martin, who’s U.S. attorney general now, who sets the series’ plot in motion when she summons Clarice (Rebecca Breeds, “Pretty Little Liars”) from her hideaway in the behavioural science unit at Quantico to Washington to help with another serial killer case.

That case, which is more complicated than it initially seems, will presumably stay in play throughout the season, although the second episode veers off into a completely unrelated investigation that superficially echoes the siege at Waco.

My issue with “Clarice” is that it doesn’t dig in a particularly deep or nuanced fashion into either its cases or its namesake’s psyche, at least not in the three episodes I saw. The inner turmoil she keeps hidden is represented by flashbacks and hallucinations of the death’s-head moths that helped her catch Buffalo Bill.

Things move at a brisk clip here, probably a factor of network TV’s preoccupation with grabbing and keeping eyeballs. Clarice is something of a criminal whisperer, able to quickly and effortlessly coax confessions out of her targets.

Clarice’s male co-workers are predictably hostile, led by Deputy Assistant AG Paul Krendler (Michael Cudlitz of “The Walking Dead”). Just as predictably, she finds an ally among the threatened men (Lucca De Oliveira of “SEAL Team”). Devyn A. Tyler (“The Purge”) plays her roomie Ardelia.

The series was shot in Toronto, so Canadian actors pop up in small roles, including Shawn Doyle as Clarice’s therapist, Kris Holden-Ried as a murder suspect and Dalmar Abuzeid as the husband of a victim.

The show’s not bad, but it’s no “Silence of the Lambs.”

21 Black Futures (Feb. 12, CBC Gem)

The futures imagined in the 21 “monodramas” in “21 Black Futures” range from the next day, as a preteen girl contemplates how she’ll present herself at school, to a time when a series of viruses has wiped out much of life on Earth.

What all of the short theatre pieces have in common is that the protagonists, the people deciding what those futures will be, are Black. Each is written by a Black playwright, staged by a Black director and performed by a solo Black actor.

Some have post-apocalyptic settings as in “Cavities” by K.P. Dennis, in which a woman (Alison Sealy-Smith) seeds the soil with her teeth and her rage before deciding to pass on joy to the next generation instead; and “Emmett” by Syrus Marcus Ware, in which a survivor of “the fall” (Prince Amponsah) decides he’d rather stay and try to heal the Earth than colonize Venus, where life has just been discovered.

Anti-Black racism is an undercurrent in all of the stories but not the point of them; they’re about Black people taking control of their realities.

So in “The Death News” by Amanda Parris, a Black man (Lovell Adams-Gray) prerecords his own obituary rather than let media dictate how he is remembered. In “Umoja Corp” by Jacob Sampson, a Black man (Pablo Ogunlesi ) is freed from jail on the condition he help other Black people navigate the system. In “Sensitivity” by Lawrence Hill, a Black woman (Sabryn Rock) treats her firing after a racial sensitivity seminar gone wrong as an opportunity rather than a failure.

This first batch of seven dramas, which includes “The Death News,” “Sensitivity” and “Jah in the Ever-Expanding Song” by Kaie Kellough, debuts Feb. 12, with another seven on Feb. 19 and the final seven on Feb. 26.

I found the ones I sampled by turns touching and thought-provoking and worth watching.

If you’d like to know more about Black visual artists, at least in the United States, HBO has “Black Art: In the Absence of Light” (Feb. 9, 9 p.m.).

If you’d like another series that falls outside the white gaze, check out “Gespe’gewa’gi: The Last Land” (Feb. 13, 7 p.m., APTN), a docuseries about the Mi’gmaq fishing community in Listuguj, Que. It’s certainly a timely topic given the ongoing conflict between Indigenous and non-Indigenous fishers in Nova Scotia.

Belgravia (Feb. 14, CBC Gem)

“Downton Abbey” was such a sensation that anything Julian Fellowes did as a followup was bound to pale in comparison (although I still have high hopes for “The Gilded Age”).

His “Belgravia” is a respectable addition to the period drama catalogue but not one that will inspire “Downton”-level devotion.

For one thing, it’s not what it might at first appear. It opens in Brussels in 1815, just days before the Battle of Waterloo. The focus is on an ill-advised romance between Sophia Trenchard (Emily Reid), daughter of the man who supplies provisions to the British army, and the aristocratic Lord Edmund Bellasis (Jeremy Neumark Jones). They rendezvous at a ball held by his aunt, the Duchess of Richmond (the ball really happened) but, before a scandal can erupt, the British march off to confront Napoleon. Soon it’s 26 years later, Sophia and Edmund are both dead, and we’re in London, in the upper-class neighbourhood of Belgravia.

The story shifts to the older members of the cast, which is not a bad thing given that the main protagonists are played by two formidable actors, Tamsin Greig and Harriet Walter. They are Anne Trenchard, mother of Sophia, and Lady Brockenhurst, mother of Lord Bellasis. 

They share their grief as well as a secret emanating from the long-ago relationship between their children but have opposing views of how to handle it. 

Anne’s husband, James (Philip Glenister), has an appetite for social climbing that she finds distasteful — an ambition inherited by their lazy but entitled son, Oliver, and his acquisitive wife, Susan.

Lady Brockenhurst and her husband the Earl (Tom Wilkinson) have greedy relatives of their own to deal with, including a brother with a gambling problem and his boor of a son.

There’s also a new pair of socially mismatched lovers, Charles Pope (Jack Bardoe) and Maria Grey (Ella Purnell).

“Belgravia” takes a sharper look at class differences than “Downton” did, with the Trenchards and Brockenhursts on either side of the new/old money divide.

Another way that “Belgravia” differs is that it’s harder to invest in these characters. Many of them are unlikeable, including the servants, a bitter and venal bunch with little if any loyalty to their employers.

Still, “Belgravia” is lovely to look at and there are enough plot twists to keep the six episodes interesting.

Short Takes

Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel (Feb. 10, Netflix)

Netflix’s latest true crime entry takes you down a disturbing and sometimes weird rabbit hole. It concerns the disappearance of a 21-year-old Canadian, Elisa Lam, at the infamous downtown Los Angeles hotel in 2013. Note though, that although Joe Berlinger, the Oscar- and Emmy-nominated producer/director behind crime docuseries like “Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes,” lays out the Lam case in painstaking detail, it’s a misnomer to call it a crime. I won’t spoil the series if you want to watch for yourself by telling you what happened to Elisa and why, but be warned that there’s a bait-and-switch going on here and that the very title of the series, “Crime Scene,” is grossly inaccurate. And while the violent history of the hotel itself is interesting (if you watched “Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer” you’ll be interested to know that Richard Ramirez stayed there) it has nothing to do with the sad story of Elisa Lam. The series also gives undue weight to the community of web sleuths and conspiracy theorists that has sprung up around the Lam case. Some of the theories are truly bizarre, completely ungrounded in reality and have harmed people’s lives, notably the death metal musician who was falsely accused of murdering Elisa. Netflix also has the new funeral home comedy “Buried by the Bernards” and the rom-com sequel “To All the Boys: Always and Forever,” both on Feb. 12. 

If you devoured the most recent season of “The Crown” and especially its Charles and Diana storyline you might be interested in “Diana: The Interview That Shocked the World,” debuting on BritBox Feb. 9. The interview itself, between Diana and BBC journalist Martin Bashir in November 1995, is sprinkled sparingly through the documentary, which mainly features commentary on how the interview came about, the effect its revelations about Diana’s failing marriage had on the royal family and the public, and whether it set in motion the events that led to Diana’s death in 1997.

I ran out of time before I got to preview “Little Birds” (Feb. 14, Crave), but it sounds like it’s worth a look. It’s set in 1950s Tangier and stars Juno Temple (“Dirty John,” “Ted Lasso”) as an American heiress trying to find freedom in a colourful setting stocked with eccentric characters, including Yumna Marwan as a Moroccan dominatrix.

A couple of Canadian shows debut new seasons on Valentine’s Day. “The Great Canadian Baking Show” is back for its fourth edition (Feb. 14, 8 p.m., CBC) with new hosts Alan Shane Lewis and Ann Pornel. And the comedy “Second Jen” starts its third season (Feb. 14, 8:30 p.m., OMNI 2) with Jen (Samantha Wan) trying to deal with a social media troll and Mo (Amanda Joy) having to endure a conflict resolution seminar at work.

CLARIFICATION: I edited the item on “The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” on Feb. 15, 2021 to reflect my revised opinion on the series after I watched the entire thing.