What’s on TV
THE MTV VIDEO MUSIC AWARDS 8 p.m. on MTV and the CW; Stream on vma.mtv.com. MTV’s Video Music Awards will go on this year, held at various outdoor locations in New York City. Keke Palmer will host the event, and Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande are scheduled to perform. Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande’s collaboration “Rain on Me” was nominated for seven awards, including video and song of the year. The show will also give out two new awards created because of the coronavirus pandemic: best music video from home and best quarantine performance. Preshow performances and interviews will air ahead of the main event at 6:30 p.m. Eastern on MTV.
TOP GEAR 8 p.m. on BBC America. The Top Gear team kicks off a new season with a special episode set in Nepal. The hosts — Paddy McGuinness, Freddie Flintoff and Chris Harris — set out on a treacherous journey from Kathmandu to Lo Manthang in vehicles that they’ve designated “perfect city cars.” Their selections are put to the test as the drivers navigate bustling cities, busy mountainous roads and wet, muddy conditions.
UNITED SHADES OF AMERICA 9 p.m. on CNN. On the final two episodes of Season 5, W. Kamau Bell looks into immigration and homelessness on two sides of the country. The first sees Bell meeting with Iranian immigrants in New York, to better understand their American experience. Then, on the season finale, Bell spends time on Los Angeles’s Skid Row, which has become the epicenter of the city’s homeless population. There, he looks into the various factors that contributed to the crisis, and meets people living on the streets and those who are trying to help.
LOVE FRAUD 9 p.m. on Showtime. This four-part documentary series tracks an alleged con man in real time. According to a number of women, a man, Richard Scott Smith, has spent the last 20 years charming potential romantic suitors through online dating websites, rushing into marriage and then leaving his wives broke or in debt. But his scheme unravels when a number of women team up with Carla, a female bounty hunter, who works to track Smith down to seek justice.
What’s Streaming
DRIVEN TO ABSTRACTION (2019) Watch through Projectr. In 2011, the prestigious New York art gallery Knoedler & Company found itself at the center of a major scandal, linked to the sale of a $17 million painting purportedly by Jackson Pollock that turned out to be a fake. Federal investigators eventually linked the fake, as well as a number of others passed off as previously unseen abstract expressionist masterpieces, to a small-time art dealer and a single forger in Queens. This documentary, directed by Daria Price, looks into the fraud and the characters who made it possible, exposing some uncomfortable truths about the art market and how it operates.
