TUESDAY
JUNE 12
2018

BIANCULLI’S BEST BETS

 

TCM, 6:00 a.m. ET

Tuesdays and Thursdays this month, TCM devotes all day, and even some of the night, to the Hollywood musical. The action starts very early today, at 6 a.m. ET, with 1943’s Best Foot Forward. The best treats come a little later, though, and are well worth stacking up in the queue of your DVR. There’s Gene Kelly dancing and swashbuckling (dance-buckling?) his way through 1948’s The Pirate at 2:30 p.m. ET, showing off his ambitious, sometimes dangerously athletic choreography. At 8 p.m. ET, to kick off prime time, there’s 1949’s On the Town, with Kelly leading his fellow fleet week sailors on a whirlwind tour of Manhattan (spoiler alert: The Bronx is up, and the Battery’s down). And at 10 p.m. ET, there’s 1943’s Cabin in the Sky, an important period black musical in which good and evil (in this case, angels and devils) fight for the soul of a gambler. It’s the cast, not the story, that makes this musical so mandatory: Co-stars include Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson and, as not-so-sweet Georgia Brown, a very young Lena Horne (pictured).

 

 
  
 
 

AMC, 10:00 p.m. ET

A very long time ago, back in the mid-Sixties, executive producer Quinn Martin followed up The Fugitive with another drama about a man traveling alone on a seemingly unending quest. That series was The Invaders, and starred Roy Thinnes as a man who had a close encounter of the third kind, and spent the series trying to persuade people of the presence of aliens from outer space in our midst, passing as human. The aliens had an easy visual “tell” – webbed fingers – and on Humans, the new generation of “synths” has a tell as well. Their eyes are a decidedly different color, as in orange, than those bright greenish eyes of the less docile and predictable old models of humanoid creations.
 
  
 
 

FX, 10:00 p.m. ET

SEASON FINALE: This Noah Hawley take on the Marvel Comics universe, basically a seasons-long study of paranoia, schizophrenia and the paranormal, has become my favorite TV series of 2018. It’s winding down season two, with only this bonus episode finale left to go – and even with that short a runway, I have no idea where it’s going. But with last week’s glimpses into potential alternate futures (David as an evil godlike despot, pictured) and weird alternate realities and dreamscapes (that giant hole in the desert, that giant drain plug, those ninja monks!), how can you not stay tuned?

 
  
 
 

National Geographic, 10:00 p.m. ET

In tonight’s Episode 9, Picasso has a problem with the woman nearest him – and that goes for both the older and the younger Picassos, though the women, like the eras in which they interact with the artist, are decidedly different.

 
  
 
 
 
 
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David Bianculli

Founder / Editor

David Bianculli has been a TV critic since 1975, including a 14-year stint at the New York Daily News, and sees no reason to stop now. Currently, he's TV critic for NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and is an occasional substitute host for that show. He's also an author and teaches TV and film history at New Jersey's Rowan University. His 2009 Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of 'The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour', has been purchased for film rights. His latest, The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific, is an effusive guidebook that plots the path from the 1950s’ Golden Age to today’s era of quality TV.