Terminal City
Sundance. Premieres March 6, at 9 p.m.
A very dark comedy in ten episodes, this Canadian import navigates between giggles and a gag reflex. Maria del Mar (Price of Glory, 24) is the happy-go-lucky wife of Gil Bellows (Ally McBeal) and live-and-let-live mother of two teenagers and a 7-year-old. No sooner does she learn that she has breast cancer than she finds herself starring in a hospital reality-TV show initially called Post Up!, in the course of which she will narrate her own mastectomy on camera. So the fatal-disease-movie-of-the-week meets a metacritique of reality shows, and it’s almost too scary to watch. The family goes not so much dysfunctional as berserk. Besides Champagne, marijuana, and a baseball bat, plot points include the Holocaust and golf. In no other television program that I have ever seen has any other father felt called upon to caution his children to be careful by saying, “Your mother has been reading Schopenhauer.”

John Adams
HBO. Premieres Sunday, March 16, at 8 p.m.

New Amsterdam
Fox. Premieres March 4, at 9 p.m.

Terminal City
Sundance. Premieres March 6, at 9 p.m.

Related:

• Archive: “Television”
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