The Best Shows and Movies to Watch This Week: Blindspot Series Finale, Wild India

We wouldn't say "the pipeline is showing no signs of drying up," because that's not true; there's definitely a lot less stuff coming out now than there was a few months ago, but there are still plenty of great new things coming to television, as you can see from the titles below. Netflix and cable channels are keeping their pantries stocked, and Blindspot's final season, which was filmed last year before we even heard the phrase "COVID-19," has been a lifeline for NBC for the past few months. But the drama will be ending Thursday. 

The Blindspot series finale is just one of many great recommendations for stuff to watch this week, along with the arrival on Netflix of a certain basketball docuseries you may have heard about, the second season of a period crime anthology, a BBC nature doc, and a Netflix true crime series about the Mafia.

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The Alienist: Angel of Darkness

Season 2 premiere Sunday at 9/8c on TNT
TNT's late 1800s-set murder mystery The Alienist is back to fulfill all your period drama murder mystery needs, of which there are many. In the new season, subtitled Angel of Darkness and based on Caleb Carr's follow-up novel to The Alienist, Sara (Dakota Fanning) has now opened her own private detective agency, as all the cool women do, and she reteams with Daniel Brühl's Dr. Kreizler and Luke Evans' John Moore, who is now a reporter for The New York Times, to find the kidnapped infant daughter of the Spanish Consular. Their investigation takes them down a sinister path while also digging into a number of issues of the era, including institutional corruption, inequality, and the role of women in society. Man, thank god they solved all those issues back then and we don't have to worry about them now. -Kaitlin Thomas

The Last Dance

Sunday on Netflix
ESPN's sensational documentary about the Chicago Bulls' 1997-98 season comes to Netflix, a few months after it served as the only entertainment for pandemic-depressed NBA fans after sports got canceled. If you missed it then, you can catch it now. Or if you watched it then, you can watch it again, and bask in Jordan's megalomaniacal glory. The 10-episode docuseries gives an in-depth history of Michael Jordan's basketball career with the Bulls, built around the occasion of the Bulls' second three-peat and final championship season, which they knew going in would be the last year Jordan, disgruntled second-best player Scottie Pippen, enigmatic coach Phil Jackson, eccentric defensive specialist Dennis Rodman, and the rest of the squad would be together. It's imperfect, mostly due to being filtered through Jordan's (an uncredited executive producer) self-serving and proudly petty perspective, but it's still an illuminating and entertaining portrait of greatness, and an unmissable trip down memory lane for basketball fans. [TV Guide review]

12 oz. Mouse

Monday at midnight/11c on Adult Swim
In a turn of events that's weird even by Adult Swim standards, absurdist animated comedy 12 oz. Mouse is returning for a third season, 14 years after Season 2 (the revival started with a one-off special in 2018). The show, from creator Matt Maiellaro, follows an alcoholic mouse named Fitz through surreal misadventures that can't really be explained in a way that will make sense in a paragraph-long blurb. "Issa vibe," as the kids say. The original series had maybe the crudest, most intentionally bad animation TV had ever seen, but the revival is taking things in a different direction, with animation that doesn't look like it took two minutes to draw. It's still absurd, though, and Fitz is still drunk. The rest of the season will air every night through Aug. 1 at midnight on Adult Swim.

Corporate

Season 3 premiere Wednesday at 10:30/9:30c on Comedy Central
It's more than likely that you've been away from the office for a while now, but before you get nostalgic for free coffee and highlighters, let Comedy Central's excellent satire Corporate snap you back to reality. The overlooked series heads into its final season of dreary corporate culture commentary, following two junior executives stuck in limbo at a faceless, evil conglomerate run by TV's great utility man Lance Reddick. There are few comedies that make me laugh harder AND want to put a gun to my head. -Tim Surette

Fear City: New York vs. the Mafia

Wednesday on Netflix
Yet another story about New York City and the Mafia in the '70s? That's right! I'm gonna hoover it up like I'm in the bathroom at Studio 54 with Roy Cohn and Bianca Jagger. It's one of the most picked-over periods of American history, but it remains fascinating because even though it feels so long ago, like it happened in a different world, it's still relevant to today. The heyday of the Mafia is long gone, but an admirer of how organized crime ran New York's construction industry is in the White House, and he's fond of Mafia tactics. Trump casts a shadow over this docuseries, which finds new angles on the familiar tale of the peak and collapse of the Five Families, including never-before-heard FBI wiretaps, and a focus on the FBI's lone female agent working the case. It's the rise and fall of an empire, with larger-than-life characters and stranger-than-fiction drama. That will always be interesting, no matter how many times you hear the story of Joe Colombo and Crazy Joe Gallo.       

Love on the Spectrum

Wednesday on Netflix
The dating lives of people on the autism spectrum get explored in this warm docuseries from Australia. Dating is hard for anyone, but it gets even more complicated when you add spectrum disorders into the mix. But you'll find yourself rooting for, relating to, and believing in all of the endearing young people this series profiles, many of whom go on their first dates with the cameras rolling. It's like Dating Around where the date's conversation consists of SpongeBob SquarePants impressions. Netflix truly has a dating show for everyone.  

Blindspot

Blindspot, NBC's half-serious action series about tattooed, ass-kicking amnesiac Jane Doe (Jaimie Alexander) and her FBI pals, comes to a close after five seasons and 100 episodes. That's 100 time bombs defused with one second remaining. But there will be no more cliffhangers after the last one, which found Jane maybe getting her memory erased again. The finale will wrap things up in typical Blindspot fashion, with big fights, close calls, wisecracks, and technobabble mumbo-jumbo that makes you say "If you say so." And as befits a show as concerned with memory as Blindspot, it will end in the same spot where it began, and will include cameos by many Blindspotters past.  

Wild India

Saturday at 8/7c on BBC America
The latest David Attenborough-narrated BBC nature documentary is a special exploring the state of Karnataka in Southern India, which is home to mountain rainforests, coral reefs, and a vast and diverse animal population, including more wild tigers and elephants than any other place on the planet. It's a very unique and special place, and the BBC's peerless nature camera teams spent three years with 15,000 hours in the field in order to film Karnataka like it had never been filmed before. 

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