BBC America, 8:00 p.m. ET
SPECIAL PREMIERE: This New Year’s special is the one burst of new Doctor Who we’ll see for now, and it’s transitional – marking the final appearance for some of the characters traveling in the TARDIS of late. But not the Doctor: She will continue to be played, at least for a while, by Jodie Whittaker, who begins this special confined in a super-secure Space Prison. Meanwhile, we get to spend some time with John Barrowman as Jack Harkness, a character who first appeared on Doctor Who back in 2005, then starred in the Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood from 2006 to 2011. While the Doctor is imprisoned, Captain Jack teams with the Doctor’s time-traveling and space-traveling companions to square off against the latest incarnation of the villainous Daleks, who have been trying to exterminate the Doctor since his/her first incarnation when the British series launched in 1963. And here it is, 2021, with a new Doctor Who special – and with the Daleks now capable of logging individual frequent-flyer miles. In other words, the drones are now airborne…
CNN, 4:00 p.m. ET
I started talking about television on CNN in a documentary miniseries called The Sixties, leading off that nonfiction series by being part of an hour devoted to the decade in television. That first outing isn’t repeated tonight, but the TV-focused openers of the next four CNN decades miniseries are, starting with The Seventies: TV Gets Real at 4 p.m. ET. That’s followed by the two-hour TV episode of The Eighties at 5 p.m. ET, the two-hour TV episode of The Nineties at 7 p.m. ET, and the two-hour TV episode of The 2000s at 9 p.m. ET. I’m in all of them, briefly – and now that it’s January 1, 2021, I hope to be contacted soon, post-pandemically, and invited to take part in CNN’s television episode of The 2010s. Because, after all, that decade ended yesterday (by some accounts, anyway), so time’s a-wasting. And a-passing…