HBO, 10:00 p.m. ET
SPECIAL PREMIERE: This comedy special, taped before an audience at a London theater, stars Jamie Morton, James Cooper and Alice Levine, who preside over what amounts to a sort of book reading with lots and lots of humorous asides. It’s based on a podcast that’s already compiled four seasons of material, and generated a successful international tour. Here’s the gist: Morton’s father once wrote a series of bad porno books (that particular phrase, by the way, comes courtesy of the Department of Redundancy Department), under the pen name Rocky Flintstone, about a saucy young woman, Belinda Blumenthal, who sells saucepans. (I told you she was saucy.) On the podcast, Morton and his two friends read enthusiastically from the books, laughing and joking all the way about the tackiness of both the plots and the prose. For this special, the trio go from bad to worse, presenting and performing a reading of a “lost chapter,” an unpublished work, that was part of the Flintstone canon but never brought to print. It is, indeed, terrible, and brings to mind the famous case of Naked Came the Stranger, the 1969 bestseller, a soft-core bestselling novel purportedly written by “demure Long Island housewife” Penelope Ashe. That book actually was written by a couple dozen authors, each contributing a chapter, under the playful eye of Newsday writer Mike McGrady. The difference: Naked Came a Stranger was written intentionally to be very, very bad, while the Flintstone stories earned that verdict honestly, like Ed Wood’s famously awful movie, Plan 9 from Outer Space. All that said, HBO’s My Dad Wrote a Porno special isn’t nearly as funny as its concept. It’s unusual enough, though, to sample, especially on a slow TV night, to judge for yourself about how long you enjoy traveling down this Rocky road.
NBC, 11:29 p.m. ET
This week, the guest host is Emma Thompson, who brings more versatility and talent, as well as more of a sense of humor, than most actors who step on the SNL center stage. Musical guests: the Jonas Brothers.