Here’s The New Show You Should Watch Right Now (May 19-25)

A critically lauded show returns.
"Vida" on Starz.
Kat Marcinowski/Starz Entertainment
"Vida" on Starz.

The weekly highlight: “Vida,” Season 2, on Starz. The entire second season debuted on the Starz app on May 23.

Premise: Two Mexican-American siblings return to their childhood home of east Los Angeles after their mother dies. Saddled with settling their mother’s financial responsibilities (including a large bar), the two must move back to work through the debts. Once in their former home, they connect more and more with the local community and find it hard to pull away.

Sum-up: The show balances big topics such as gentrification, family frustrations and diversity in America, with a fairly typical “keep the bar alive” plotline. The all-Latinx writers’ room helps make this far from a surface-level portrayal of those big topics. Special care also goes into the telling of queer lives in the Latinx community, using the jumping-off point that the siblings learn their deceased mother had a secret wife.

Heads-up: The narrative occasionally has a clunky quality more reminiscent of sitcoms, where characters act in unbelievable ways or coincidentally run into trouble to drive dramatic action. This can be jarring and frustrating for such an otherwise well-written show. Also, the second season starts with a long and graphic orgy. The next scene depicts two different characters in a separate sex scenario that involves dominance and butt play. So, just go in expecting that.

Will everyone be talking about this? Critics will, but Starz remains a more niche service than its competitors.

You can watch the trailer for “Vida” below.

Read on for more recommendations and news from the week. And in the navigation bar above, you can choose specific recommendations for series streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Here’s the trailer:

A Couple Of Streaming News Stories From This Week

1. The new “Westworld” trailer for Season 3 appears to highlight a near-total reboot of the storyline, with actor Aaron Paul having existential malaise in a futuristic world. I gave up on Season 2, but I have to say I’m intrigued again.

2. “Game of Thrones” ended with a cringeworthy last episode that seems to be widely disliked. Meanwhile, over 1 million people signed a petition calling for HBO to remake the last season. That petition will obviously go nowhere, but that number of signatures is no joke. Most HBO shows don’t even get 1 million people to watch on a given night.

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