The Good Wife
CBS, Sunday at 9 p.m.
The best network series is leaving the air after seven seasons. “The Good Wife’’ was an emblematic show that spoke directly to the politics, the media, and the gender issues of the decades since the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Set in Chicago, the action opened with one of our era’s now ritualistic images: Julianna Margulies’s Alicia Florrick standing by her philandering state’s attorney husband, while cameras flashed at them. And then the show went backstage, behind the political theater, to explore how these marital circumstances might play out, what the phrase “good wife’’ means, what role political enemies might play in exposing the truth, and how an accomplished woman might cope with being reduced to a Tammy Wynette cliché. I’ll miss it.
Game of Thrones
HBO, Sunday at 9 p.m.
And so it looks as though Jon Snow has been revivified. That wrinkled crone who wears the Melisandre flesh costume appears to have brought him to awareness with a few incantations and the burning of some of his rock-star hair. Surprise [said in irony]. It may turn out that the new Lord Commander isn’t the same as the old Lord Commander, so there may be a twist in store for us. But after almost a year of manipulative promotion about whether or not Jon Snow was really, truly, honestly dead, I ultimately felt disappointed and misused. I found myself wishing that HBO and the “Game of Thrones’’ producers had played off all the expectation and let him remain dead, really dead. It would have been a sideways comment on the hype, a giant, resounding “Psych!’’
Janis: Little Girl Blue
Streaming at PBS.org
Danger, heartbreak dead ahead. You know you’re going to have a bad case of the feels watching this “American Masters’’ documentary about Janis Joplin by Amy Berg. Joplin was a raw nerve, a vocalist whose deep pain entered her voice when she sang, a lonely soul who was filled simultaneously with confidence and self-doubt, a live performer who could turn a concert into an urgent emotional adventure, and a pioneer as a woman in the rock world. The documentary features interviews with Melissa Etheridge, Pink, Kris Kristofferson, Laura Joplin, Clive Davis, Bob Weir, and Dick Cavett. Some of the people who knew her well, including her bandmates from Big Brother and the Holding Company, talk about how she numbed herself with heroin. But the dominant voice in the film belongs to Joplin herself, in performance clips that show her in almost primal agony, and in her personal letters to her family, which are read by Chan Marshall (a.k.a. Cat Power).
What If
Various streaming services
I recently watched “What If,’’ and it affirmed my respect for the actress Zoe Kazan. The movie is fine, if you like earnest romantic comedies with charm if not surprise, which I do. And Daniel Radcliffe, as a decent-hearted, anxious med school dropout falling for someone who’s already taken, is appealing and quite leading-man-ish. But Kazan really stands out as the woman who wants to be “just friends’’ with Radcliffe’s character. I often feel like I’m watching an actress on her way to greatness almost every time I see Kazan. I certainly felt that way after seeing her in HBO’s “Olive Kitteridge,’’ as mousey pharmacy assistant Denise Thibodeau. She turned the helpless young woman into comic relief, a fountain of joy, and a figure of great pathos.
MATTHEW GILBERT
