‘The Underground Railroad’: Barry Jenkins’s transfixing adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel is fabulistic yet grittily real.‘Succession’: In the cutthroat HBO drama about a family of media billionaires, being rich is nothing like it used to be.
Here are some of the highlights selected by The Times’s TV critics: Television this year offered ingenuity, humor, defiance and hope. boss (played by Chris Noth) in a prime example of the dialogue, alternately stiff and threadbare, she has to do battle with. “Everybody’s playing chess, nobody’s thinking about the living, breathing pieces that we sacrifice along the way,” she tells her former C.I.A. agent - who grew disillusioned with the government’s methods and retired. Like the male Equalizers played by Edward Woodward (in the original series) and Denzel Washington (in two films), Latifah’s Robyn McCall is a former intelligence operative - this time identified as a C.I.A. Latifah puts a human face on the formulaic silliness and incapacitates faceless bad guys with aplomb, but there’s nothing in the pilot that requires her to do anything but coast on her charm. And on the evidence of Sunday night’s premiere, the only episode available for review, CBS is firmly in control. In the words of the ad the Equalizer uses to solicit clients - placed in a newspaper in the 1980s television series, on Craigslist in the 2014 film remake and on social media in the new series - the odds are against her. But will a CBS procedural drama give her the room to do anything besides cash checks for seven or eight years? When she cuts loose, in movies like “Bessie” and “Chicago,” she has a fierce and quick-witted swagger few performers can match. Hearing that Queen Latifah is playing the title role in a new iteration of “The Equalizer” - that combination of latter-day Robin Hood and action-movie vigilante - inspires equal measures of expectation and dread.