This week's TV: A Karen Read docuseries, Ellen Pompeo's new show, and more

Boston Globe

17-03-2025

Director Terry Dunn Meurer ('Unsolved Mysteries') had unprecedented access to the first high-profile trial of Read, and shares her footage here.
What else clicks this week?
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March Madness
,' tomorrow on CBS (for the men's tourney), and Wednesday on ESPN (for the women's): Now there are even more reasons not to leave your Barcalounger except for snacks. The men's NCAA Tournament launches tomorrow. The first four games will be hosted by the UD Arena in Dayton, Ohio, on Tuesday and Wednesday, with competitive rounds continuing nonstop until the Final Four on April 5 at San Antonio's Alamodome. That's also the setting for the April 7 NCAA Championship game. The women's championship begins with its first four Wednesday, culminating on April 6 at Amalie Arena in Tampa, Fla. The sports competitions are epic poetry in motion as today's most competitive teams, and fierce underdogs, dribble and dunk in the climactic month for college hoops.
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Good American Family
,' Wednesday on Hulu: Massachusetts native Ellen Pompeo, best known for putting the Grey in beloved medical series 'Grey's Anatomy,' joins Mark Duplass in a creepy eight-part limited series. Inspired by true events, the drama follows a loving, caring Midwestern couple, Kristine and Michael Barnett. The parents of three biological kids adopt an additional child with dwarfism, Natalia (Imogen Faith Reid). Before long, the Barnetts become suspicious that little Natalia isn't at all who they assumed she was, and maybe not even a minor. Her arrival sends their good American family into a tailspin that tests the couple's marriage and threatens their children's well-being.
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Happy Face
,' Thursday on Paramount+: Movie star Dennis Quaid goes dark in this eight-episode true crime drama, portraying the notorious 'Happy Face' killer, Keith Hunter Jesperson, who's currently serving multiple consecutive life sentences in Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. His estranged biological daughter, Melissa Moore, wrote about her diabolical dad in her 2009 true crime autobiography and discussed in her subsequent podcast. Annaleigh Ashford plays Moore in this series about their relationship.
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The Residence
,' Thursday on Netflix: Shonda Rhimes's Shondaland ('Grey's Anatomy,' 'Bridgerton') does the celebrity whodunit with a twist: The setting is inside the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. In this screwball crime comedy for lovers of 'Only Murders in the Building,' Uzo Aduba's salty detective Cordelia Cupp sifts through 157 suspects when staff discover a corpse on the third floor of the private residence. The savvy sleuth questions family and staff played by Barrett Foa, Edwina Findley, Juliette Jeffers, Randall Park, Giancarlo Esposito, Al Mitchell, and Paul Fitzgerald as President Perry Morgan in order to reveal the wily killer.
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Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light
,' Sunday on PBS 'Masterpiece': It took the late historical fiction queen Hilary Mantel years to complete the final volume of her Tudor trilogy. Now, in the BBC's small-screen version that spans five episodes, English actor Mark Rylance returns as the wily politician of humble origins, Sir Thomas Cromwell. He finally meets the dire fate he'd sidestepped for so long: receiving the ax (no spoiler here) in 1540. Damian Lewis continues his role as King Henry VIII.