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After A Full Fall, A Few New TV Choices To Tide You Over

TNT's new period drama <em>Mob City</em>, from <em>The Walking Dead</em> creator Frank Darabont, is one of several shows and miniseries premiering this month.
Scott Garfield
/
TNT
TNT's new period drama Mob City, from The Walking Dead creator Frank Darabont, is one of several shows and miniseries premiering this month.

As the holiday season approaches, the TV cupboard may seem a bit bare; the industry winds down like everything else, filling cable and broadcast networks with holiday specials, reruns and also-ran reality shows.

But there are bright gifts, too: TNT offers Mob City, a three-week, lavishly produced noir-ish TV show about cops and crooks vying for control of 1947-era Los Angeles, airing Wednesdays.

On Dec. 8 and 9, A&E presents a four-hour miniseries on Bonnie and Clyde, retelling the story of the Depression-era outlaws and lovers.

If you miss The Walking Dead, the Sundance Channel has The Returned, a French series airing on Thursdays and Sundays about dead people returning to life in a town, unaware that they are dead and looking like they did right before death (with subtitles, it feels like a well-made, eight-hour foreign film).

Fans of NBC's singing competition The Voice can check out The Sing-Off, which returns Monday as a competition of a capella groups, and if you must see a reality show, try Discovery's Dude, You're Screwed, a series starting Sunday that snatches up a survival expert from his everyday life (all of the contestants in the first series are men) and plops him into an unforgiving environment with 100 hours to get back to civilization.

I think I'd take the cameraman hostage, myself.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Eric Deggans is NPR's first full-time TV critic.