Tutus, tiaras and time travel! Oh my! Hulu will premiere the third season of “Find Me in Paris,” a ballet fantasy that combines every young dancer’s dreams with time-travel secret missions right out of “Doctor Who.”
Jessica Lord stars as Helena “Lena” Grisky, a Russian princess who finds herself in Paris in 1905, training at the Opera de Paris. She appears fated “to become the greatest ballet dancer who ever lived,” or so she says.
This fantasy is filled with similar gushing observations, delivered in the poshest British accent a Russian-born princess can muster. She finds herself in love with another dancer; soon learns that she’s part of a time-traveling family; finds herself trapped in the far-off year of 2018 and on the run from something called the “Time Collectors.”
“Paris” sports lots of great scenery, the occasional dance number and pretty people from various eras. It’s completely preposterous proof that not all comic book reveries are aimed at guys.
“Paris” airs and streams in more than 130 countries. There’s also a lot of it. Like TV shows of yore, its first two seasons offered 26 episodes each. So if you’re new to “Paris,” there’s much to binge.
— Speaking of giving the people what they want, Netflix streams the fifth season of “Lucifer.” The first three seasons of the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced series aired on Fox. Netflix picked it up for a fourth and now a 16-episode fifth helping that will be broken into two eight-episode dollops.
Based on a graphic novel, it stars Tom Ellis as Lucifer Morningstar, who departed hell for Los Angeles to own a nightclub and consult for the local police. Good stories require good characters, and characters are based on limitations and the choices we make to overcome them. It’s simply absurd for a supernatural entity with limitless powers to fit into the day-to-day routine of a film noir gumshoe. Why would he want to? And why should we care?
— Netflix also debuts the caustic cartoon series “Hoops.” Jake Johnson (“New Girl”) voices Ben Hopkins, the coach of a losing high school basketball team. Best known as the son of an overbearing restaurant owner and the cuckolded husband of a flagrantly wandering wife, Ben is put upon but not pitiable. He takes his rage out on his pimply players.
Predictably nasty dialogue, matched by undistinguished animation not dissimilar to “Rick & Morty” make this eminently skippable. As one non-fan commented below the show’s official trailer: “They canceled ‘BoJack Horseman’ to spend money on this?” Actually, I cleaned up that comment quite a bit. This is a family newspaper!
— Faced with the existential threat of streaming and dwindling subscribers, many cable networks have gone into greatest-hits mode, churning out series almost absurdly similar to their other fare.
“100 Days Wild” (9 p.m., Discovery, TV-14) follows a gaggle of potential survivalists hoping to make a go of it in remote Alaska. Alaska! When have we gone there before?
Over on HGTV, “Backyard Takeover” (10 p.m.) follows landscape experts as they turn neglected spaces into showstoppers. That’s pretty much the “plot” of the reality series “Ground Force,” something I used to enjoy watching on BBC America — 20 years ago.
TONIGHT’S OTHER HIGHLIGHTS
— Live performances on “America’s Got Talent” (8 p.m., NBC, r, TV-PG).
— “WWE Friday Night SmackDown” (8 p.m., Fox, TV-PG).
— “Great Performances” (9 p.m., PBS, r, TV-PG, check local listings) presents a Broadway revival of “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The King and I.”
— The murder of an EMT fits a grim pattern on “Blue Bloods” (10 p.m., CBS, r, TV-14).
— A nurse downloads an app that predicts that she only has three days to live in the 2019 shocker “Countdown” (9 p.m., Showtime).
CULT CHOICE
Peter Cushing and Diana Dors star in the 1973 shocker “From Beyond the Grave” (2 a.m., TCM, TV-PG), four stories of the macabre (by Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes) set in the same antiques shop.
SERIES NOTES
Soccer cheats on “MacGyver” (8 p.m., CBS, r, TV-PG) … New socks afoot on “Shark Tank” (8 p.m., ABC, r, TV-14) … Dean Cain hosts “Masters of Illusion” (8 p.m. and 8:30 p.m., CW, r, TV-PG).
The war of the roses gets thorny on “Magnum P.I.” (9 p.m., CBS, r, TV-14) … “20/20” (9 p.m., ABC) … On two helpings of “Being Reuben” (CW, TV-PG): stage fright (9 p.m.); just plain folk (9:30 p.m.) … “Dateline” (10 p.m., NBC, TV-PG).
LATE NIGHT
Jeff Goldblum, Annie Murphy and Sam Jay visit “Late Night With Seth Meyers” (12:35 a.m., NBC, r) … Lena Waithe and Raleigh Ritchie appear on “The Late Late Show With James Corden” (12:35 a.m., CBS, r).
