Hit the road this weekend with AJ And The Queen, or call for help from the Medical Police
Here’s what’s happening in the world of television for Friday, January 10, and Saturday, January 11. All times are Eastern.
Top pick
AJ And The Queen (Netflix, Friday, 3:01 a.m., complete first season): At long last, a road trip show in which a drag queen forced to delay her retirement teams up with a tiny child who wears butch hats. Keep an eye out for Liz Shannon Miller’s review of this warm-hearted series, which is overflowing with cameos from Drag Race alums, if you’re into that sort of thing. (We, obviously, are into that sort of thing.) [Allison Shoemaker]
Medical Police (Netflix, Friday, 3:01 a.m., complete first season): It’s hard to do comedy and action at the same time, especially if you’re expected to take either aspect seriously at all. But Netflix’s Medical Police—a semi-explicit follow-up to Adult Swim’s Childrens Hospital—tries to sidestep that issue by choosing not to take either aspect seriously, embracing the very silly humor of the original series while adding an explicitly goofy and absurd action plot on top of it. Reprising their characters from Childrens Hospital, Medical Police stars Rob Huebel and Erinn Hayes as a pair of doctors at a children’s hospital that is definitely in Brazil who stumble onto a medical mystery and quickly—like, in a matter of minutes—join the CDC’s secret black-ops division in a battle against international bio-terrorists.
Medical Police is at its best when it’s dropping joke after joke, like in a madcap foot chase featuring overly pushy shopkeepers, a gun-wielding mime, and a conversation between Huebel and Hayes where they try and reassure each other that they weren’t being racist for pursuing a possible terrorist who happened to be Muslim (it turns out they were being racist and he was not a terrorist). The show stumbles a bit when it tries too hard to move its playfully byzantine plot forward or when it inserts a rare straight-faced fight scene, but that’s a side-effect of Medical Police’s widely expanded scope and budget. If you’re going to parody action movies and medical shows at the same time, things are bound to get a little messy when you have to make jokes and have a shootout and perform emergency surgery at the same time. To put it simply, the show is more Childrens Hospital, in every possible way. [Sam Barsanti]
Regular coverage
Wild cards
Lincoln Rhyme: Hunt For The Bone Collector (NBC, Friday, 8 p.m., series premiere): For a moment, look past the fact that the title makes this show sound like something that was a big hit for the NBC of the 30 Rock universe (Kenneth would get kind of addicted to it even though it scared him; he and Tracy would both start having night terrors; Jenna would get a guest spot, convincing them both that she’s a serial killer; final joke of the show suggests that she maybe actually is a serial killer). Adapted from Jeffrey Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme series, this show stars the excellent Russell Hornsby and features a menacing Brían F. O’Byrne, so no matter how ludicrous the title might be, we are duty-bound to check it out. [Allison Shoemaker]
Forky Asks A Question (Disney+, Friday, 3:01 a.m., first-season finale): Oh, Forky.
In the finale for this first (and hopefully not only) season of this short-form gem, Forky (Tony Hale) asks the question, “What is reading?” Coincidentally, the star of AJ & The Queen makes that very query with some frequency.
If Forky whips out a pair of sunglasses and tears into Hamm or some other toy, we will keel over and die. [Allison Shoemaker]