New on the small screen

Amy Schumer after ‘Trainwreck’ and the chill on ‘Everest’.

By HANNAH BROWN
‘Trainwreck’ (photo credit: PR)
‘Trainwreck’
(photo credit: PR)
The big new hit from HBO, The Night Of, will begin airing on YES Oh on August 8. The series stars John Turturro as a criminal lawyer who defends a young Pakistani/American man accused of murder. It’s a remake of the acclaimed BBC series Criminal Justice, and the British series starts airing on July 28 on YES London.
Those who liked Trainwreck, written by and starring Amy Schumer, will be happy to hear that the wait is almost over for the new season of her television series, Inside Amy Schumer. It will begin airing on HOT Comedy Central and HOT VOD on August 7 at 10:30 p.m. and will run from Sunday to Thursday.
Schumer is outrageous and outrageously funny. Trainwreck was like a collection of bits from her show with a little plot added. Among her guests on the show this season are Liam Neeson, Selena Gomez and Jake Gyllenhaal. In the spot with Gyllenhaal, she takes part in an episode of Catfish, the television series based on the movie of the same name, in which Yaniv Schulman and Max Joseph investigate whether people are who they claim to be on line. Schumer comes to them saying she has met a guy in a chat room claiming to be Jake Gyllenhaal. When they show up, it is the real Gyllenhaal, but things are still not quite what they appear to be.
Whether or not she is working with celebrity guests, Schumer manages to be funny with her combination of self-deprecating humor and social commentary. Tina Fey was great at making fun of herself and the world around her, and when 30 Rock ended, in which she starred as a character based loosely on herself, it left a void – we always need great female comics – that Schumer has filled.
Fey is now writing and producing the Netflix series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. The darkly comic show tells the story of its title character, played by Ellie Kemper (Bridesmaids), a woman who was kidnapped by a doomsday cult leader (Jon Hamm) and held in a bunker for years. The series starts when she is rescued and has to find a way to live in the real world again. Fey has appeared in a few episodes, but she is not the center of the series as her Liz Lemon character was on 30 Rock.
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is available for streaming in Israel on Netflix, although most people I know gave up on Netflix when it became clear that our local version offered only about one percent of what is available in the US.
If the heat is getting you down, you might enjoy watching mountain climbers freezing in the snow in Everest, which will be aired on YES 2 on July 29 at 10 p.m.
This movie tells the story of the ill-fated climbing expedition in May 1996 during which several climbers, among them some of the guides who were in charge, died when a storm suddenly descended on the mountain.
Although the movie is not based on the bestseller Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer (which is a great read, even if you aren’t particularly interested in climbing), it is about the same incident.
It was directed by Baltasar Kormákur, the Icelandic director who made the offbeat comedy 101 Reykjavik.
Everest isn’t just a story about a group of climbers who were unlucky, but it examines how the industry of guided tours of this mountain has become big business, with climbers paying upwards of $60,000 for the chance to climb. This leads to situations where inexperienced climbers are accepted onto these extraordinarily dangerous and challenging expeditions because they can pay or are celebrities. The guides are also under pressure to bring their clients to the summit because “summiting” is considered the point of the whole trip by many clients, even if the conditions become threatening.
The movie stars Jake Gyllenhaal (before his run-in with Amy Schumer) as one of the guides, Josh Brolin as a stubborn Texan climber who was left for dead, and Michael Kelly (House of Cards) as Krakauer.
After you watch this movie, you’ll be grateful for the sweltering heat.