The Best Shows and Movies to Watch This Week: Apple TV+’s Pachinko, Bridgerton Season 2 on Netflix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYNCws-a6CQ

“I know I said we’d hang out, but I’m going to watch Pachinko on Apple TV+ instead” is a good excuse to get out of a scheduled engagement. “Can we push girls’ night out to next week? Halo premieres on Thursday” is also perfectly valid. “Hey doc, I’d like to reschedule my emergency appendectomy. Season 2 of Bridgerton is out on Friday, and I can’t leave the house” is a very clear way to establish your priorities that others will understand. The end of the week is stacked with great options, so feel free to clear your schedule for what’s truly important in your life with the best shows and movies to watch this week. 

Our list of editors’ picks for the week of March 23-March 29 is below, but if that’s not enough and you’re looking for even more hand-picked recommendations, sign up for our free, spam-free Watch This Now newsletter that delivers the best TV show picks straight to your inbox. You can also look at our massive collection of recommendations, as well as our list of suggestions for what to watch next based on shows you already like.

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THE BEST SHOW TO WATCH TONIGHT

Clive Davis: Most Iconic Performances

Series premieres Wednesday, March 23 on Paramount+
Why go to one concert when you can go to all of them? In Paramount+’s four-part miniseries Clive Davis: Most Iconic Performances, the legendary music executive highlights some of his all-time favorite musical performances from the likes of Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell, Jay-Z, and Queen. Adding a behind-the-music spin, Davis, who will turn 90 in early April, also interviews plenty of the artists and the people close to them. It’s illuminating. –Kelly Connolly [Trailer]

THE BEST SHOWS AND MOVIES TO WATCH THIS WEEK

Halo

Series premieres Thursday on Paramount+
One of gaming’s biggest money-makers finally (FINALLY!) gets an adaptation when Halo premieres this month after years of development. For the uninitiated, a space marine blows up a ton of s*** and kills aliens. For fans of Xbox’s first-person shooter, Halo will explore the background of Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber) and the discovery of technologically advanced alien weaponry known as the Halo. As is the case with any adaptation of a beloved property, Halo is bound to be polarizing, but it isn’t as bad as it could have been. That said, it isn’t taking any big risks, either, and the result is a bigger budget Syfy show set in a familiar universe that branches out into the unfamiliar. There’s some good CGI in the battles between Chief’s Spartans and the alien Covenant, but there are also times when the CGI is merely passable. Still, Schreiber manages to make something out of the notoriously monotonous hero, but we’ll see if that can be sustained through the season and the already-ordered Season 2. –Tim Surette [Trailer | Review]

Atlanta

Season 3 premieres Thursday, March 24 at 10/9c on FX, available Friday on Hulu
Atlanta is leaving Atlanta. One of TV’s best (and weirdest) comedies is back for its long-awaited third season, which brings the group to Europe, where Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) is in the midst of a big international tour. Paper Boi, along with Earn (Donald Glover), Darius (LaKeith Stanfield), and Van (Zazie Beetz), grapple with their new positions as outsiders, alternately embracing and struggling to adapt to their unfamiliar surroundings. Atlanta hasn’t aired new episodes since 2018, and all four of its stars have been involved in high-profile projects in the interim, which makes the questions Season 3 promises to raise about the trappings of fame even more intriguing. –Allison Picurro [Trailer | Review]

Starstruck

Season 2 premieres Thursday, March 24 on HBO Max
Starstruck Season 2 dares to answer the question, “What happens after you pull a Notting Hill?” The romantic comedy series picks up where Season 1 left off, with Jessie (Rose Matafeo) facing the consequences of deciding to stay in London and date an extremely famous person. She and Tom (Nikesh Patel) deal with the things any two people in a new relationship deal with, like meeting a significant other’s family and staging dramatic scenes for Daily Mail photographers. Amid a sea of increasingly dark TV shows, Starstruck is still a super funny, impossibly delightful balm. –Allison Picurro [Trailer]

Bridgerton

Season 2 premieres Friday, March 25 on Netflix
Dear reader, you probably don’t need us to tell you that March has just been one long march until the return of Bridgerton. The hit romance, one of Netflix’s most-viewed shows of all time, is back and ready to get scandalous like the Regency era Gossip Girl it is — even though it’s missing Season 1 star Regé-Jean Page. Now that Simon (Page) and Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor, who is back this season) are living (mostly) happily ever after, Season 2 shifts the focus to the romance between Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) and Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley), which is packed with animosity and close-ups of hands. That’s right: This one’s for Pride and Prejudice fans. Here’s everything else we know about Season 2, which also features a corgi. –Kelly Connolly [Trailer |Review]

Pachinko

Series premieres Friday on Apple TV+
I don’t use the term “sweeping epic” lightly, as it should be reserved for only the grandest of tales, so believe me when I say that Apple TV+’s new series Pachinko carries one massive broom. The international production is an adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s best-selling novel, following a Korean family from the early 1900s in Japan-occupied Korea to the end of that century when new generations are making their way in business in Japan. Directed by acclaimed Japanese director Kogonada and Korean director Justin Chon and starring Korean heartthrob Lee Minho and enthralling Korean newcomer Minha Kim, the trilingual Pachinko expertly tells a universal story with easy-to-understand time jumps, weaving the emotion of generational family dramas, the intensity of Korean romantic dramas, and the intellectualism of historical dramas into one of the best and most well-reviewed shows of the year. Pachinko is a big swing that makes full contact with your heart. This is not to be missed. Three episodes air Friday, with more coming weekly. –Tim Surette [Trailer | Review]

Olivia Rodrigo: driving home 2 u (A Sour Film)

Friday, March 25 on Disney+
Olivia Rodrigo began her career as a Disney Channel child actor and is currently the star of a Disney+ show, but her ascent to pop superstardom was not Disney-branded. Her debut album, Sour, has a Parental Advisory sticker and was released by Geffen Records, whose catalog includes albums from Nirvana and blink-182. But now Disney has found a way to directly profit off Sour with the Disney+ documentary driving home 2 u. The doc gives a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of Rodrigo’s chart-topping album and features new arrangements of some of the album’s songs. -Liam Mathews [Trailer]

The 94th Oscars

Sunday, March 27 at 8/7c on ABC 
This might be the last Academy Awards ceremony ever, so you might as well tune in! I’m kidding, but last year’s ceremony was the lowest-rated telecast since Nielsen started keeping records, and producers are panicking trying to drum up interest, and it’s just not working. After three host-less years, this year will have three hosts, Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes, and Regina Hall. Gen Z’s favorite comedians. The Power of the Dog is the heavy favorite to win Best Picture, but I’m putting my money on Don’t Look Up, because that would be the funniest outcome, and history bears out the theory that Academy voters will surprise you with the wrong choice more often than the right one (Crashover Brokeback Mountain, to name the most infamous example). -Liam Mathews

The Girl From Plainville

Series premieres Tuesday on Hulu
If you can stomach just one more dramatization of a true story, then save room for The Girl From Plainville. Hulu’s take on Michelle Carter, the high schooler at the center of the 2014 “texting suicide” case that saw her boyfriend, Conrad Roy, kill himself after Carter texted him encouragement to do so, focuses the story on Carter and Roy rather than the sensationalism of the alleged crime. It’s a more thoughtful take than other recent true-story series like The Dropout, Super Pumped, and WeCrashed, studying the possible mental health issues that drove Carter (Elle Fanning) and Roy’s (Colton Ryan) behaviors. Fanning and Ryan are fantastic as the star-crossed teen lovers, garnering sympathy out of something so tragic, and the series avoids the big mistake others commit: Instead of making heroes out of its central characters, it makes them fully dimensional. -Tim Surette [Trailer]

How to Survive a Pandemic

Tuesday at 9/8c on HBO, HBO Max
Given how well we’re not doing surviving a pandemic, especially here in the U.S., don’t take the title of this documentary too literally. The film, from How to Survive a Plague director David France, documents the rush to create a vaccine for the coronavirus, a herculean effort led by the international science community. France trains his cameras on the virologists as they make breakthroughs, collaborate, and work around the clock, all while quarantining from the very threat they’re trying to eradicate. There have been a lot of pandemic documentaries over the last year, but we haven’t seen one with this angle. -Tim Surette [Trailer]

RECENTLY RELEASED

American Song Contest

Series premieres Monday, March 21 at 8/7c on NBC
In this country’s never-ending quest to make everything about us, we have now decided to create our own version of Eurovision. Will it work? Let’s find out! Americavision, which is hosted by Kelly Clarkson and Snoop Dogg, is a competition series in which representatives from each U.S. state and territory vie for the title of “Best Original Song,” and a few of those representatives will be famous artists like Michael Bolton (Connecticut), Macy Gray (Ohio), and Jewel (Alaska). Eurovision is known for being a super entertaining, shamelessly bizarre spectacle, so the bar could not possibly be higher. –Allison Picurro [Trailer | Everything to know about American Song Contest]

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