Agatha Christie's The Pale Horse (Amazon Prime, Friday, 3:01 a.m., complete first season): "Unlike its 1961 source material, [Sarah] Phelps' adaptation presents protagonist Mark Easterbrook (Rufus Sewell, looking, as usual, like a snake who's smugly satisfied to be slipping inside his very expensive human suit), not as a bystander to a series of mysterious deaths all linked to a trio of possible witches operating out of a small-town fortuneteller's shop, but rather as a man up to his neck in grisly events. From the jump, Easterbrook displays an uncanny knack for surrounding himself with dead women, even before the police (represented more as an external threat than an investigative body, courtesy of Sean Pertwee's gravel-voiced Inspector Lejeune) find his name on a list hastily hidden in a dead woman's shoe. There's nothing impartial, then, to Easterbrook's hunt for the truth; when he injects himself into the investigation, it's with the clear air of someone trying to get out from under something, rather than an outsider observer on the hunt." Read the rest of William Hughes' pre-air review.
Élite (Netflix, Friday, 3:01 a.m., complete third season): "The question of the future hangs thick in the air as the students of exclusive Las Encinas high school continue to grapple with love, hormones, and way too many crimes. The first season of Èlite had spoiled rich kids fighting to maintain their status quo after the introduction of three scholarship students threw everyone's world off balance. The second season saw the characters trying to return to a past that had been destroyed. These new episodes center on the big questions the clique faces with the prospect of adulthood: 'What future do I want to build? What future do I have access to? And what future can I expect when my entire high school experience has been defined by the murders of not one, but two of my classmates?'" Read the rest of Ines Bellina's pre-air review.
100 Humans (Netflix, Friday, 3:01 a.m., complete first season): This series, in which a diverse group of 100 humans subject themselves to a series of tests and experiments to test hypotheses that vary wildly in tone, scope, and usefulness, seems well-timed. What are the odds that the question about the right way to use the bathroom includes a segment on hand-washing?
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