Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, March 22-28. Details and times are subject to change.
Monday
INDEPENDENT LENS: CODED BIAS 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The filmmaker Shalini Kantayya (“Catching the Sun”) examines the ways biases and inequities have become embedded in algorithms and other technology in this, her latest documentary. Kantayya focuses on the M.I.T. Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini, who has done prominent work on the subject. (Buolamwini was a witness at a congressional hearing on facial-detection technology in 2019, an event that the documentary covers.) Kantayya also looks at how these digital biases play out in the real world using examples in the United States and abroad, where algorithms can determine who qualifies for certain housing or who gets stopped by law enforcement. The documentary “tackles its sprawling subject by zeroing in empathetically on the human costs,” Devika Girish wrote in her review for The New York Times last year. She added that the movie “moves deftly between pragmatic and larger political critiques, arguing that it’s not just that the tech is faulty; even if it were perfect, it would infringe dangerously on people’s liberties.”
AFRAID: FEAR IN AMERICA’S COMMUNITIES OF COLOR 9 p.m. on CNN. Just days after killings at three Atlanta-area massage parlors amplified fears about the recent rise of violence against Asian-Americans, the CNN anchors Amara Walker, Anderson Cooper, Victor Blackwell and Ana Cabrera will host a discussion about the state of hate in America, and how crimes like last week’s terrorize communities of color.
Tuesday
BUGSY MALONE (1976) 8 p.m. on TCM. Pinstripe suits and potty-mouth language come together in this bizarre mobster musical satire, which casts a group of young actors (including Jodie Foster and Scott Baio) in a prohibition-era gangster story. The movie’s writer and director, Alan Parker, replaces bullets with whipped cream and Model Ts with toy pedal cars; and his story is injected with musical numbers by the songwriter Paul Williams. The results, Vincent Canby wrote in his 1976 review for The Times, are “wildly uneven but imaginative and stylish.”


FAST-FORWARD: LOOK INTO YOUR FUTURE 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Hollywood makeup artists might get jealous of the technology used in this documentary, which follows several families who experiment with suits designed by M.I.T. researchers that allow their wearers to get a preview of what their bodies might feel like in old age. Narrated by Rosario Dawson, with original music by Andrew Bird, the documentary uses the technology as a tool to encourage the families to plan for the future.
Thursday
CASINO (1995) 6 p.m. on VH1. If the whipped-cream Tommy guns in “Bugsy Malone” (airing Tuesday) are too childish for you, consider instead this over-the-top Scorsese mob movie, where the bullets are real and the liquor is consumed legally. The story, based on a nonfiction book by the journalist Nicholas Pileggi, spans years. It revolves around a mobster (Robert De Niro) whose gig managing a Las Vegas casino leads to murder and betrayal. “Scorsese has been here and done this already in ‘Goodfellas,’ but not with his new film’s blistering bitterness or its peacock extravagance,” Janet Maslin wrote in her 1995 review for The Times. “The long, astonishing Copacabana sequence in ‘Goodfellas,’” she added, “was only a warm-up for this.”
Friday


TO SLEEP WITH ANGER (1990) 10 p.m. on TCM. The filmmaker Charles Burnett paints a surreal portrait of a family in this poetic drama, which was Burnett’s third feature. Paul Butler and Mary Alice play a mother and father in Los Angeles. The couple’s relationship, and more, start to waver after an old friend, Harry (Danny Glover), who they haven’t seen in years, arrives at their doorstep out of the blue. When “To Sleep with Anger” was reissued by the Criterion Collection in 2019, The Atlantic’s David Sims referred to it as “one of the best movies of the 1990s, an American masterpiece that remains relatively unheralded almost 30 years after its release.”


TINA (2021) 8 p.m. on HBO. The life of Tina Turner — her rise to stardom, her escape from an abusive relationship, her cementation as a figure of rock resilience — is revisited in this new documentary from Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin (“Undefeated”). The film combines archival footage with present-day interviews, including with Angela Bassett, Oprah Winfrey and the playwright Katori Hall, who was the lead book writer for the recent musical “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.” Expect Turner herself, who is also interviewed, to bring her legendary persona down to earth. “I don’t necessarily want to be a ‘strong’ person,” she told The Times in 2019. “I had a terrible life. I just kept going. You just keep going, and you hope that something will come.”
THE 52ND N.A.A.C.P. IMAGE AWARDS 8 p.m. on BET and CBS. You’d be hard pressed to find an awards season event more wide-ranging than the N.A.A.C.P.’s Image Awards, which honor film, television, music and writing all at once. Nominees this year include Regina Hall, who is up for the best actress in a comedy series prize for “Black Monday”; Delroy Lindo, a best actor in a motion picture nominee for his performance in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods”; and the writer Brit Bennett, whose novel “The Vanishing Half” is up for the top literary-fiction prize.
Sunday
GREAT PERFORMANCES: MOVIES FOR GROWNUPS AWARDS WITH AARP THE MAGAZINE 8 p.m. on PBS. At 59, George Clooney probably isn’t quite old enough to qualify for senior discounts at his local multiplex yet, but he was still on the cover of AARP’s magazine earlier this year. He’s also slated to receive a career achievement award at this year’s edition of the AARP’s awards show, which recognizes films and TV programs. The NBC anchor Hoda Kotb will host.

Source: New York Times

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