What’s on TV Friday: ‘Blaze’ and a ‘Jim Gaffigan: Quality Time’

What’s on TV

BLAZE (2018) 8 p.m. on Showtime. Ethan Hawke directed and co-wrote this biopic about the Texas singer-songwriter known as Blaze Foley. Before his death in 1989, Foley (whose real name was Michael Fuller) made a name for himself singing country songs and picking an acoustic guitar. He’s played here by the actor and musician Ben Dickey, who stars opposite Alia Shawkat. Shawkat plays Sybil Rosen, an actress and theater artist with whom Foley runs off to the woods, in search of romance and creative freedom outside the constraints of the music business. The guitarist Charlie Sexton also features in the cast, portraying the singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, who was a friend of Foley’s. Hawke “is clearly motivated by nothing but affection for Blaze, Townes, Sybil and the state of Texas,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times. “He doesn’t so much scramble biopic conventions as allow himself and the audience to be distracted from them.”

GETAWAY (2013) 6 p.m. on HBO. For a look at Ethan Hawke involved in a movie that’s very different from — and much louder than — “Blaze,” see this straightforward action movie. Hawke plays a former professional racecar driver who speeds through the streets of Sofia, Bulgaria, in a souped-up Ford Shelby GT500 after his wife (Rebecca Budig) is kidnapped.

What’s Streaming

JIM GAFFIGAN: QUALITY TIME Stream on Amazon. In the space of about a minute early on in this special, the comedian Jim Gaffigan compares his own appearance — blond, stocky — to both the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman and a “giant land salmon.” The new 75-minute set, which represents Amazon’s first original stand-up special as it moves to compete with Netflix, also sees Gaffigan discussing issues like dogs, travel and family. “He delivers his punch lines at the end of patiently established premises, and then doubles down on them using a second voice, higher-pitched and quicker in cadence,” Jason Zinoman observed in a recent article in The Times. “This device has become fairly common in stand-up, turning a solo art into a double act,” Zinoman added. “But no one does it better than Gaffigan.”

DIAGNOSIS Stream on Netflix. This new series, produced in association with The Times, translates Dr. Lisa Sanders’s “Diagnosis” column from The New York Times Magazine into the format of a documentary series. The show follows a collection of medical patients with mysterious illnesses as they search for a diagnosis — and, ultimately, a cure.

DOGMAN (2019) Stream on Hulu; Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. The Italian actor Marcello Fonte won the Award for Best Actor at Cannes in 2018 for his role as a dog groomer who sells cocaine in this crime drama, which is the most recent feature from the director Matteo Garrone (“Gomorrah”). Set in a coastal Italian town, the plot follows the dog groomer (whose name, like the actor who plays him, is Marcello) as he’s forced into a partnership of shorts with the local bully, a cocaine-snorting former boxer named Simone (Edoardo Pesce).

Gabe Cohn writes about television, fine art, film and other topics related to culture and the arts. He joined The Times in 2017.

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