How Much Watching Time Do You Have This Weekend?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/arts/television/muppets-disney-errol-morris-first-person.html

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Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, our TV critic Margaret Lyons offers hyper-specific viewing recommendations in our Watching newsletter. Read her latest picks below, and sign up for the Watching newsletter here.

‘Muppets Now’When to watch: Starting Friday, on Disney+

I want to believe that our society is capable of birthing another great Muppet TV show, that our good will toward the characters and their worldview will again lead us to a satisfying, joyous payoff of humor and imagination, that the simplicity of puppetry will again nudge us to fill in the blanks with our own emotional reasoning, thus creating a surprisingly personal bond of empathy. “Muppets Now” is not quite there, though it’s closer than a Muppet property has been in a long time. This new iteration replaces the variety format of “The Muppet Show” with web-series formats — a good and timely swap! — but it doesn’t always capitalize on what actually makes those web shows entertaining.

‘Taskmaster’When to watch: Sunday at 8 p.m., on the CW.

Existing somewhere between a game show, a panel show and contest show, this British series pits five comedians against one another in a series of strange and silly tasks, for example painting a horse while riding a horse, or collecting the highest weight of doughnuts in a bucket while keeping your hands on your hips. Think a combo of “Double Dare” and crossword-puzzle logic. The first six seasons of “Taskmaster” are available on the show’s YouTube channel, and starting this weekend the CW will be airing Season 8 — but there’s really no good or bad place to start. Every episode is funny and surprising. This is the show I have recommended most often and most insistently to my friends and family during quar.

‘First Person’When to watch: Now, on YouTube.

The director Errol Morris recently posted his 2000-2001 documentary series, “First Person,” on his YouTube channel, and the episodes are fascinating — often but not uniformly morbid, and also spirited and alive in ways interviews rarely are. The show, which aired on Bravo, is mostly monologues; Morris’s subjects include a retired C.I.A. agent, a woman who dated multiple serial killers, a man connected to a particularly notorious mass shooting, a researcher obsessed with giant squid. The aesthetic here is definitely of its era, but Morris’s ability to capture the human poles of passion and casualness is as exciting as ever.