By Rick Gables
Freeform will premiere its new comedy series, Everything’s Gonna Be Okay, on Thursday, Jan. 16, with back-to-back episodes starting at 8:30 p.m. ET/PT. Josh Thomas (Please Like Me) returns to television as Nicholas, a neurotic twenty-something-year-old visiting his dad and teenage half-sisters. With their father’s untimely death from cancer, the siblings are left to cope with the realization that Nicholas is the one who will have to rise to the occasion. The series also stars Maeve Press and Kayla Cromer.
HBO will premiere its new drama series, The Outsider, with back-to-back episodes on Sunday, Jan. 12, starting at 9 p.m. ET/PT. Based on Stephen King’s bestselling novel of the same name, the series explores the investigation into the gruesome murder of a local boy and the mysterious force surrounding the case. The ten-episode series follows police detective Ralph Anderson (Emmy® and Golden Globe nominee Ben Mendelsohn), as he sets out to investigate the mutilated body of 11-year-old Frankie Peterson found in the Georgia woods. The mysterious circumstances surrounding this horrifying crime leads Ralph, still grieving the recent death of his own son, to bring in unorthodox private investigator Holly Gibney (Tony Award winner and Golden Globe nominee Cynthia Erivo), whose uncanny abilities he hopes will help explain the unexplainable. Yul Vázquez plays Georgia Bureau of Investigation detective Yunis Sablo.
Smithsonian Channel revisits the legendary event that triggered the birth of tabloid headlines with its premiere of Battle of Little Big Horn on Monday, Jan. 13, at 8 p.m. ET/PT. This special explores how the proliferation of the telegraph and burgeoning newspaper industry led to a simultaneous news break across the country. The inaccurate and dramatized reporting resulted in an American public both outraged and captivated; and, with no white survivors left to tell the tale, a decisive 19th-century conspiracy theory was born. On June 25, 1876, Chief Sitting Bull and thousands of American Indians were attacked by General George Custer’s 7th Cavalry. Vastly outnumbered, Custer and his regiment were wiped out. What was to follow was a nationwide media storm — but what led to this deadly encounter, and how did history books get it so wrong?
