Public Television, Check local listings
This weekend’s new show is called
How People Power Generates Change, and features Bill Moyers interviewing such guests as lifelong activist Marshall Ganz, whose legacy of change from the grassroots level traces back to the 1960s.
Moyers & Company is shown by public TV stations locally from Friday through Sunday. To find when it’s televised in your TV market, see the
Moyers & Company website.
Check local listings.
Sundance, 8:00 p.m. ET
Robert Redford’s Sundance Channel is showing this 1975 political thriller that’s a precursor of every Bourne-again drama about secret agents gone rogue, or smelling conspiracies. This one is a great little movie, directed by Sydney Pollack and co-starring Cliff Robertson and Faye Dunaway. Redford plays a CIA researcher who suddenly is on the run, chased by his own agency – and though younger viewers may be thrown by the pivotal fact that this whole drama takes place in an era before cellphones, it ought to grab anyone who tunes in, and not let go.
PBS, 9:00 p.m. ET
You may have to take this one on faith, because it sounds dubious – but I recommend it highly. Director and editor Tadashi Nakamura has compiled a film about 36-year-old Jake Shimabukuro that is part biography, part concert touring film, and part Pied Piper reincarnated. Except that this particular enchanting musician doesn’t play a wind instrument, but a ukulele – yet unlike any ukulele player you’ve ever heard, or seen. He won me over years ago, when he first posted a YouTube video of him playing a jaw-dropping rendition of George Harrison’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps. On a four-stringed, limited-range string instrument. This film includes footage of him walking the streets of Tokyo, strumming effortlessly and passing by people who are, by turns, equally amused, impressed and stunned. Watching this one-hour documentary elicits the same reactions. Check local listings.
HBO, 10:00 p.m. ET
This week’s guests include two people who aren’t regular visitors to Maher’s show, but whose appearances here are something to anticipate. One is actor Zachary Quinto, who plays Mr. Spock (pictured) in the new Star Trek film franchise – and the other is Mark Bittman, the straight-talking, sensible-cooking New York Times food columnist.
IFC, 10:00 p.m. ET
In this second episode, Marc Maron makes room on his show, and in his podcast garage studio, for Denis Leary, who smells a rat. Well, he smells something – and apparently, it’s dead, and it’s underneath Maron’s crawlspace.