Critic’s Pick: TV Picks: ‘MasterChef Junior,’ ‘Paris,’ Tim & Eric, ‘Coroners’
“MasterChef Junior” (Fox, Fridays). The only reality show that matters returns for a fourth season, formally and straightforwardly titled “Junior Edition: New Kids on the Chopping Block.” Two dozen talented small-fry cooks will be winnowed down to one especially talented winner as your heart breaks for the eliminated week after week after week, if you have a soul. (Still, it is the loveliest thing.) The new crop comes to the show knowing the ropes and the stakes and regarding their predecessors as stars, tradition being established fast in TV time, and when you’re nine. As has been widely observed, the series is unusual for its displays of mutual admiration and support, in place of the jealousy and spite that fuel adult competitions. (There may be love and support there, too, but as a rule, you don’t get to see it.) As if to turn up the level of affection even higher, the new season swaps out forbidding former judge Joe Bastianich for the tender warmth of Christina Tosi, of Momofuku Milk Bar -- a baker, even! (There was something to be said for Bastianich’s harsh, sometimes cold forthrightness, though -- the show only really works if you feel the kids aren’t being cut any slack and if the judges are seen to be genuinely enthusiastic.) This leaves host Gordon Ramsay the closest thing on the panel to a bad guy -- after four years at Bad Guy University and two years post-graduate work in advanced villainy, Graham Elliot could still not be taken for one. But even the famously volatile Ramsay, now sporting a haircut that suggests a desire to travel back to the 1950s and start over as a pop star or petty criminal, is relatively a pussycat around the kids. I could use fewer stunts and more cooking, but I’ll watch every episode, at least once.
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“Paris” (TV5Monde, Tuesdays). Screenwriter Virginie Brac and director Gilles Bannier, who created the 2011 policier “Spiral” -- subtitled, it made a little hit here and can still be found streaming from the usual places -- re-teams for a six-part, many-threaded miniseries set over the course of a single day in the French capital. (Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts” is a stated influence.) The story mixes political intrigue, domestic drama, and underworld shenanigans; the characters, whose range of class and pursuits belies how connected they are, or will discover themselves to be, include a transsexual nightclub singer, married bus drivers, one of whom is about to lead a strike, while the other is losing his mind; a thief with a gambling debt; a prosecutor married to a journalist; the prime minister; and the prime minister’s son, among other entangled Parisians. As in “The Returned (Les Revenants),” now airing on Sundance, the melodrama -- things do get crazy -- is reined in by a determined naturalism and a generous sense of “c’est la vie.” I’m not sure whether the series is subtitled, but if you subscribe to this network, widely available on satellite and cable, the odds are you’re a Francophone anyway. And if “Spiral” is any indication, it will get to the rest of you before long.
“Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories” (Adult Swim, Friday). Old partners Tim Heidecker, who may also be found starring “On Cinema at the Cinema” and “Decker,” and Eric Wareheim, who is all over the new Aziz Ansari Netflix series “Master of None,” offer another installment in their intermittent anthology series. The series, which plays twists and variations on the departed likes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “The Twilight Zone” and “Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected,” is a horror comedy in which the comedy makes the horror no less horrible and the horror doesn’t stop the comedy from being funny. In other words, it makes you feel weird. Strange. Uncomfortable. A little queasy, maybe. Tonight’s episode, titled “Sauce Boy” -- it has an Italian theme -- offers a story of loneliness, addiction (to what, I cannot bring myself to write), acceptance and loneliness, more or less in that order. You will not be surprised when Bonnie “Prince” Billy arrives on the soundtrack singing, “You’re doomed to the life you’re meant to be/Stuck inside your reality/You’re doomed.” It’s a comedy! A Christmas special is slated for Dec. 4.
“This Is Life With Lisa Ling: America’s Busiest Coroners” (CNN, Wednesday). In which the roving reporter, who has lately roved to a rave, among a motorcycle, a polygamous cult and teenage models, gets embedded with the L.A. County Coroner’s Office. (She’s local.) Like Anthony Bourdain’s CNN show, this is the sort of journalism in which the reporter’s feelings/journey of discovery/coming to terms becomes part of the story; but (also as on Bourdain’s show) the real value of the series is being shown a world you might otherwise never know. Not surprisingly, this world looks little like like it’s fictional forensic counterparts. There are no gleaming banks of polished aluminum drawers, each with its own neatly laid out body; it’s more of a warehouse, a great profusion of corpses arranged on shelves, feet sticking out from loosely wrapped plastic shrouds. The coroner’s office processes more than 11,000 of them a year, many of which are never identified or claimed. Ling accompanies investigators to death scenes, watches an autopsy, listens to alarms going off among the filed property of the recently departed. But what strikes you, notwithstanding the laid-in score, is how calm and ordinary it all is. (Every death may be different, but there is nothing more routine.) Just the calm efficiency of people doing their jobs -- work some were apparently born to do, with enthusiasm and satisfaction. That’s a comforting thought somehow.
Follow Robert Lloyd on Twitter @LATimesTVLloyd
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