New seasons and old films

What's on this week on TV.

By HANNAH BROWN
Silicon Valley (photo credit: PR)
Silicon Valley
(photo credit: PR)
The film T2, the Trainspotting sequel, which became available on YES VOD on June 23, isn’t as groundbreaking, crazy or, well, disgusting as the original, but it’s still fun to see what director Danny Boyle has done with his four crazed protagonists 20 years on. For heroin addicts and hard-drinking petty criminals, they have aged pretty well, and most of them have become familiar faces on the small screen in recent years.
Ewan McGregor is currently starring in Season 3 of Fargo (airing on HOT HBO and HOT VOD), where he plays two brothers. One is “the parking lot king of Minnesota,” and the other is a parole officer. Robert Carlyle stars in the series Once Upon a Time (airing on YES Drama). Jonny Lee Miller plays Sherlock Holmes in Elementary, the modern-day version of this detective story, which can be seen on YES Action. And Ewen Bremner, the brilliant character actor, is still best known for his work in movies and co-stars as one of Gal Gadot’s allies in Wonder Woman.
It’s been 30 years since Wall Street was released, and while it’s dated in many ways, Oliver Stone’s film is as entertaining as ever. It is airing on June 23 on HOT Prime at 10:30 p.m. Michael Douglas won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance as the iconic, heartless financier Gordon Gekko, who made the much-quoted “Greed is good” speech. It will probably seem a bit quaint now, but there was a time when Americans rooted for Bud Fox, the young, up-and-coming investment banker from a working-class background, played by a very clean-cut Charlie Sheen.
All the issues that drove the 2016 presidential campaign are front and center in the film, as Gekko buys and sells companies with no regard for the blue-color workers his deals will doom to lifelong unemployment, among them Bud’s father, played by a pre-West Wing Martin Sheen.
Game of Thrones is returning on July 17 on YES Oh for its seventh season. It is undoubtedly the most anticipated series that will be returning in July. Israeli actress Ania Bukstein, who recently starred in the film A Quiet Heart, will reportedly be back as Kinvara, although very little is known about the new season. The Game of Thrones Channel (Channel 16 on YES) is now up and running until the series premieres.
Episodes, the very funny British/ Hollywood comedy about two English comedy writers who pen a sitcom for Matt Leblanc, was set to return this month, but it was announced that it will be back in late August.
One show that is ending its fourth season this week is Silicon Valley, which airs on June 28 on YES Oh at 11:15 p.m. and YES VOD and on HOT HBO on Mondays at 10:30 p.m. and HOT VOD.
This is the rare show that just seems to get funnier with each season, and if you don’t have time to catch up with all the previous episodes, it doesn’t really matter. All you need to know this season is that Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch), the brilliant but chronically unsuccessful developer of the greatest compression app the world has ever known, decides that the easiest way to strike it rich is to invent a new Internet. This puts all his colleagues on a roller coaster ride, and it’s as enjoyable to watch as it is heartbreaking to root for Richard.
T.J. Miller, the brilliant stand-up comic who plays the tech entrepreneur/landlord Erlich Bachman, is leaving the show. The way they write someone out these days is to have him go on a trek to Tibet.
If you still haven’t seen Season 5 of Orange Is the New Black, you should watch it on HOT Xtra VOD and HOT HBO. So many characters have been added, and each gets their moment, so it’s sprawling and you may not remember everybody’s name, but television doesn’t get much better than this. I truly think that when people look back on this Golden Age of television, OITNB will be remembered as one of the gems.