Syndicated, 7:00 p.m. ET
SERIES PREMIERE: This new syndicated series has been rushed into production, in hopes of capitalizing on political and judicial gridlock should the confirmation of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch be stalled. That would leave the highest court in the land with a general 4-4 ideological divide, and the chances for lower court rulings to stand until a ninth Supreme Court judge finally is approved. This is where The People’s Supreme Court comes in: petitioners normally arguing before the full Supreme Court could opt to appear in this unofficial televised courtroom instead. And who’s presiding? Judge Wapner is dead, Judge Judy is busy – so this opportunistic TV series is handing its very unofficial gavel to a very unofficial judge… Judge Reinhold. Check local listings.
TV Land, 8:00 p.m. ET
SPECIAL: Eleven years ago, Donald Trump appeared on the 2006 Grammy Awards, making a surprise appearance during a medley in which various celebrities took turns singing familiar TV theme songs. Trump, as himself (at the time, a New York real estate tycoon) and Megan Mullally, in character as the brazenly wealthy and comically clueless Karen from Will & Grace, sang the theme to Green Acres. That was the 1965-71 sitcom that started out as Beverly Hillbillies in reverse, with rich folks going to the country, but soon became flagrantly surreal, with Eddie Albert and heavily accented Eva Gabor, as Oliver and Lisa Douglas, urban millionaires turned rural farmers, dealing with goofy neighbors, silly problems, and a scene-stealing pig. Well, just before deciding to run for President, Trump made this TV Land pilot for a modern remake, in which he and his wife Melania Trump starred as Oliver and Lisa. This unsold, formerly unseen pilot is a real treasure. But why stop there? If it were revived as a series in a few years, Green Acres 2020 couldn’t miss – let's face it, Donald and Melania Trump in Green Acres would be HUUUGE. (And President Trump already knows the words to the theme song.) Let’s just hope, by the fall TV season that year, he’ll be free to entertain other business interests.
HBO, 9:00 p.m. ET
MINISERIES PREMIERE: The first season of HBO’s Westworld established that there were other amusement park “worlds” that were part of this troubled, part-android universe. To keep fan appetites whetted until the second season begins, HBO is presenting this limited-duration miniseries, set in an intense, isolated facility where visitors – the type who love to play videogames and computer chess, and compete against artificial intelligence – are placed into dehumanizing testing centers to compete with SAT-type standardized tests. Only visitors who score in the Top 10 percent move on to the next level. And those who score in the Bottom 10 percent are forced, before returning home, to spend two days working in Fastfoodworld.
Food Network, 9:30 p.m. ET
SEASON FINALE: This long-running Russian propaganda series, broadcast often in almost unavoidable rotation on the RT state-controlled Russian television network, has finally been dubbed and imported for U.S. viewers. Americans finally can see what Russians have seen for years now: Their leader, Vladimir Putin, insisting on national television that he’s just a harmless and regular guy. Every year on this show, Putin moonlights, and shows off his “common man” connections, by taking a series of “regular jobs”: computer hacker, poison-spraying assassin, and even a hotel waiter. But that last occupation was only so Putin could get product-placement kickbacks from both the hotel chain and the cracker manufacturer, and charge extra for working them into that season’s TV title. That money has proven difficult to trace to Putin – but Putin on the Ritz, though it’s no longer shown in Russia, is now available for all of us to see in this country. Only in America…
Comedy Central, 10:00 p.m. ET
SPECIAL: Comedy Central has made a lot of unsuccessful series pilots over the years – but never before has found a way to repurpose or amortize them. This new one-week special collects lots of unsold and unsuccessful series pilots from the Comedy Central archive, starring such currently hot comics as Trevor Noah and Samantha Bee, and presents them back-to-back in a one-hour time slot. The comic and pilot with the higher rating gets to move on to the semifinals; by the time the week is over, a “winner” has been crowned. But the real winner is the viewer, because none of these once-buried comedy pilots will be revived after this. Not Noah’s Archetype, not To Bee Or Not To Bee, nor any of the others…
FX, 10:00 p.m. ET
SERIES PREMIERE: You can’t blame FX for cashing in on its increasingly relevant period drama series The Americans, which features a pair of Russian secret agents working undercover as everyday Americans in Ronald Reagan’s Cold War 1980s. But rather than present a dramatic reversal, with American spies pretending to be everyday Soviets, FX is going the comic route. In this period sitcom set in the 1960s, Dave Thomas and Sally Kellerman play bumbling American secret agents tasked with infiltrating the U.S.S.R. by posing as everyday Soviet citizens. The problem, and the alleged humor, comes from the fact that these spies base their cover identities entirely on the pop-culture spies they’ve seen on movies and TV – starting with Boris and Natasha from The Bullwinkle Show.
BBC America, 10:55 p.m. ET
SNEAK PREVIEW: When the producers of the just-completed Planet Earth II were considering what to do next, the first thing they considered was to collectively commit to a third entry in this fabulous series about life on Earth. The original Planet Earth was televised in 2006, and the sequel premiered in the United Kingdom ten years later, in 2016. To try to drum up enthusiasm and backers for the project, one of the producers, using CGI special effects, generated a “teaser special” purporting to show some of the images likely to be presented in 2026, after a decade of our newly revised environmental policy spreads across the planet. The producers had planned for a one-hour special – but after crunching the numbers, and following the trends of global warming, it only took a five-minute special, which BBC America televises tonight, to do the trick – and make the point. (Today's Best Bets were brought to you by Fake News. Our proud slogan: "Misinforming the public, one lie at a time.")
