Hamilton arrives, and The Baby-Sitters Club is open for business
Here’s what’s happening in the world of television for Friday, July 3, and Saturday, July 4. All times are Eastern.
Top picks
Hamilton (Disney+, 3:01 a.m., premiere): By the time you read this, this little paragraph will be old news to some of you. The reason for that is simple: Confronted with the knowledge that in the middle of the night a filmed performance of Hamilton with the original cast would become available, you found that you were, sleep be damned, willing to wait for it.
The rest of you may wake up and ask yourself, “What’d I miss?” The answer is “Nothing, this cultural juggernaut is still alive and well on Disney+, just ready for you to stream it,” and at your earliest convenience, your curiosity can be satisfied. With theaters around the world closed, the room where it happens is, in fact, yours.
The Baby-Sitters Club (Netflix, Friday, 3:01 a.m., complete first season): Cue the old theme song!
Here’s some of what Nadra Kareem Nittle had to say about this engaging series:
The BSC books were published from 1986 to 2000, so watching the Netflix adaptation might require some suspension of disbelief. For one, latchkey kids ruled the ’80s, when it seemed plausible that parents would entrust middle schoolers with their small children. But today, when helicopter parents make headlines and unaccompanied children walking home from school spark police calls, it’s a stretch to think suburban parents would hire tween sitters for more than the length of a grocery store run. That middle schoolers would use a landline to book appointments also requires a leap of logic. But Claudia is dead-on when describing their translucent phone as “iconic,” as it was a must-have for ’90s kids (the babysitters land one via Etsy). References to Tinder and slang like “basic” place the story in the present, but the show’s home decor and fashion make it look timeless.
Click here to read the rest of her pre-air review, then go say hello to your friends.
Regular coverage
RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars (VH1, Friday, 8 p.m.)
The Twilight Zone (CBS All Access): Binge coverage continues, concluding Saturday
Wild card
Hanna (Amazon, Friday, 3:01 a.m., complete second season): “When the first season of Hanna arrived in early 2019, it seemed like creator David Farr was given license to strip-mine his earlier, and far more interesting, film, to capitalize on the girl power craze. That first season simply remixed the story beats of the 2011 tale that featured Saoirse Ronan as the titular teenage super-soldier, a feral warhead of a girl learning to harness and deploy her formidable martial skills. The movie is as much a coming-of-age story about a daughter emerging from her father’s protective embrace into a colder world as it is an art-house action flick. Unfortunately, the series leaned into the more standard fare badassery, cleaving away everything that gave the original take its immersive strangeness. Hanna season two is still more of a spy thriller than a fractured fairy tale—but freed from the need to tell the same story, it evolves into something more thoughtful and compelling.” Click here to read the rest of Laura Bogart’s pre-air review.
Can you binge it? Yes, the first season is alive and well on Amazon Prime.