Neal Justin's TV picks for Oct. 20-24 – 'Living With Yourself,' 'Modern Love,' 'The Misery Index'

October 18, 2019 at 12:30PM
Anne Hathaway in "Modern Love." (Amazon/IMDb/TNS) ORG XMIT: 1454906
Anne Hathaway in “Modern Love.” (The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Love is in the air

Rom-coms may be an endangered species in theaters, but the genre is alive and kicking in "Modern Love," a new anthology series based on the long-running New York Times column. Watching glamorous stars like Andy Garcia, Tina Fey and Dev Patel flirt and fight to coffeehouse music can get a little precious, but even curmudgeons will be forced to smile when Anne Hathaway leads a musical number in a grocery-store parking lot.

Now streaming on Amazon Prime

Face off

Paul Rudd does double duty in "Living With Yourself," an unpredictable new dramedy about a sad-sack advertising executive who may lose his wife (Aisling Bea) to his peppier 2.0 version, manufactured in a strip mall. Rudd offers a master class in subtle acting, differentiating his competing characters with the teeniest adjustments in posture and turns of the mouth, but the eight-part series works only because Bea is so properly flustered by a bizarre version of the Dating Game.

Now streaming on Netflix

Les miserables

"The Good Place" star Jameela Jamil takes contestants to very bad places in "The Misery Index," a game show in which contestants try to predict how experts rated the impact of groan-inducing situations like a husband leaving his wife after winning the lottery or a bulldog attacking its owner's private parts. "This isn't the 'Price Is Right!' " bellows a member of "Impractical Jokers," whose members chime in as advisers. No, it isn't.

9 p.m. Tuesday, TBS

Neal Justin


The actor Paul Rudd in New York on Sept. 5, 2019. The star of "Ant-Man" and "Avengers: Endgame" confronts himself, quite literally, playing both an imperfect man and his perfect clone in "Living With Yourself." (Valerie Chiang/The New York Times)
Rudd (The Minnesota Star Tribune)
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