What’s on TV Friday: ‘The Banker’ and ‘Blow the Man Down’

Samuel L. Jackson and Anthony Mackie star in a historical drama on Apple TV Plus. And “Blow the Man Down” brings sex, death and seafood to Amazon. THE BANKER (2020) Stream on Apple TV Plus.

Anthony Mackie and Samuel L. Jackson play men who join forces to subvert discriminatory housing practices in this historical drama. Set primarily before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the film begins by introducing Bernard S. Garrett (Mackie), an African-American entrepreneur who moves to Los Angeles along with his wife, Eunice (Nia Long).

There, Bernard meets Joe Morris (Jackson), a club owner with whom he teams up on an admirable scheme: Buying homes in white areas and renting them out to members of the city’s black middle class. They do that with the help of a somewhat guileless white colleague (played by Nicholas Hoult). The characters are based on real people. “It’s hard not to root for them even if they’re obvious and underdeveloped, burdened with dialogue that too often sounds programmatic rather than embodied,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times.

The film, Dargis wrote, “uses laughs, white racism and black righteousness to soft-sell a tale of inequality, heroic capitalism and eye-drooping mathematics. ” THE LETTER FOR THE KING Stream on Netflix. In a dramatically lit, expensive-looking high-fantasy world, a short, easily underestimated hero is tasked with transporting a small object across a vast distance. That’s the perhaps not entirely unfamiliar premise of this new series, an adaptation of a popular European children’s book by the Dutch writer Tonke Dragt.

The story follows Tiuri (Amir Wilson), a young would-be knight sent on a perilous letter-delivery quest. BLOW THE MAN DOWN (2020) Stream on Amazon. Sex, death and seafood all figure prominently in this eerie drama written and directed by Danielle Krudy and Bridget Savage Cole. Set in a fictional Maine fishing village called Easter Cove, “Blow the Man Down” revolves around two young locals, Mary Beth (Morgan Saylor) and Priscilla (Sophie Lowe), who try to cover up a killing — and wind up in the middle of a larger mystery.

“While the sisterhood in Easter Cove is indeed powerful,” Helen T. Verongos wrote in her review for The Times, “the secrets that bind its members prove to be fairly simple, and the result is intriguing enough to make you wonder what these writer-directors might accomplish if they applied their vision to a more expansive canvas. ” GREAT PERFORMANCES AT THE MET 9 p. m.