What to Watch: 11 Movies, Series and Projects to Stream This Week

Here’s what else is streaming this week:

New Release: ‘Master of None’

(Netflix)

When “Master of None” premiered on Netflix in 2015, the series was squarely about co-creator Aziz Ansari’s character, Dev, a 30-something struggling to find his footing in both work and love. But when the series returns Sunday for its third season—called “Master of None Presents: Moments in Love”—Dev will be a supporting character. The five-episode season focuses on Lena Waithe’s Denise, Dev’s friend with whom, as depicted in season 2, he spent Thanksgivings growing up.

In the new season, Denise has the things she thinks she’s wanted. She is now a married, best-selling author with a large, beautiful home in the country. As her marriage falls apart, she begins to rethink her priorities.

The decision to downgrade Mr. Ansari’s role was a creative one, says the show’s co-creator Alan Yang, and not because of allegations of sexual misconduct that Mr. Ansari faced in 2018 that led to public debate over issues of sexual activity and consent. (Charges were never filed.) Mr. Yang notes that during the second season, episodes had expanded to include stories centered on Dev’s group of friends, and the decision to center a season on Ms. Waithe’s Denise had been in the pipeline for years.

“The challenge and the thing that excited us was: can we get people to follow us?” says Mr. Yang. “This is pretty radical for a show to be like: Hey, we have these characters that you love, but we really want to focus on this other character and her story. And by the way, it’s somewhat of a different style. It’s somewhat of a different tone, but we really believe in this story.”

New Release: ‘Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K.’

(Hulu)

M.O.D.O.K. is rethinking his priorities, too. The angry title character in Marvel’s new animated series, “Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K.,” is a giant, floating head (Patton Oswalt) who wants to take over the world. But he has become so fixated on his work that he hasn’t noticed that things are falling apart at home and in his empire’s finances.

“It ultimately became a show about a midlife crisis for a super-villain,” says showrunner Jordan Blum, “a guy who loses his job and his family and has to fight for what he cares about and what’s important to him.”

All 10 episodes of the absurdist comedy’s first season drop Friday on Hulu.

Mr. Blum says they built more than two-dozen seething, big-headed, hand-painted, 3-D-printed, immaculately costumed M.O.D.O.K.s to use on different miniature sound stages during production. To animate the series, the creators tapped Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, the crew behind the popular Adult Swim series “Robot Chicken.” The studio’s unique take on stop-motion, he said, lent itself to the verité-style storytelling they were after in portraying what a floating head with world-wide ambitions is like when he’s not at work in the field.

“What does it take to run an evil organization? Like, it’s not all taking over the world,” says Mr. Blum. “There’s probably a bureaucracy and HR and paychecks.”

New Release: ‘The Dry’

( Amazon, Vudu, Apple TV, etc.)

To American audiences, “The Dry” will be seen as a movie set in Australia. But for Eric Bana, it’s a movie is about Victoria, the Australian state the 52-year-old actor has always called home. It’s not the desert, he says, and it’s not the Outback. It’s “little country Australia.”

“These are the towns that we experienced growing up, traveling through,” he says. “To get from point A to point B, you will go through 20 of these towns if you’re an Australian person.”

“The Dry” is based on the best-selling novel by Jane Harper and is in theaters and on-demand in the U.S. on Friday. Mr. Bana stars as Aaron Falk, a big-city detective whose boyhood friend and his family are found dead in an apartment murder-suicide. Attending the funeral, Falk returns to the small town he grew up in and sticks around to look into the murders.

“Anyone who’s from a small country town, no matter what country you’re from. understands that notion of everyone knows your business. Everyone knows the business of your family, your parents, your grandparents,” says Mr. Bana. “That’s a very common thing.”

New Release: ‘Yearbook’

(Amazon’s Audible, Apple Books, etc.)

“Yearbook,” the latest from actor Seth Rogen features cameos from Snoop Dogg, Dan Aykroyd, Tommy Chong and other boldfaced names. No, it’s not a movie or TV show. It’s the audiobook version of his new memoir, for which he has enlisted some of his famous friends and colleagues.

“Yearbook” is a compilation of stories from the life of the actor best known for his roles in films like “Knocked Up,” “Superbad” and the international incident that was “The Interview.” It begins at the intersection of his dreaded visits with his grandparents and his first time performing stand-up comedy on stage as a kid. When he lands a couple of jokes about them, he recalls, the visits with his grandparents “suddenly became something else. Something new. They were fodder. They were…material! I also began to suspect that maybe, just maybe, they knew they were being funny.”

Streaming Notes:

• Back In Treatment: HBO’s drama “In Treatment,” which follows the treatment of three different characters in psychotherapy, returns for its fourth season on Sunday. Uzo Aduba plays psychotherapist Dr. Brooke Taylor, taking over the lead role from Gabriel Byrne, who plays her supervisor. HBO is airing four episodes a week, which can also be streamed on HBO Max.

• Zack Snyder’s “Army of the Dead” is out Friday on Netflix, a week after it hit theaters. To read more about Netflix’s efforts to build a franchise from scratch read John Jurgensen’s report here.