MONDAY
APRIL 13
2015

BIANCULLI’S BEST BETS

 

Acorn TV, 12:00 a.m. ET

MINISERIES PREMIERE: Part 1 of 3. Acorn TV is importing and presenting this three-part British miniseries, starring David Morrissey as a Manchester cabbie turned getaway driver, over as many weeks. You can watch the opening installment on Acorn’s streaming service beginning any time today, with Part 2 arriving next Monday, and the concluding installment a week after that. For Walking Dead fans who loved to hate Morrissey as the Governor, watching this 2014 miniseries may be interesting, and genre fans may also be pleased by the actor playing the tough-guy mobster: He’s Colm Meaney, who broke out as Chief O’Brien on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. This opening installment starts and ends with a car chase – the same one – which serves to bookend the flashback that explains how and why Morrissey’s cabbie went from fare to foul.

 
  
 
 

Starz!, 7:20 p.m. ET

Purely by coincidence, the scheduling tonight of this 2014 Angelina Jolie movie provides a fascinating opportunity to flip between a new movie and its original inspiration. That’s because, at 8 ET tonight, The Disney Channel televises Disney’s original 1959 take on the Maleficent story, its animated Sleeping Beauty movie…

 
  
 
 

Disney Channel, 8:00 p.m. ET

…Once this 1959 Disney animated film begins, have some fun switching your channels between this one and the Starz! channel, which will be partway through presenting Angelina Jolie in the title role as the embodiment of Maleficent. Compare and contrast. Extra points if you switch between the same scene in both movies.

 
  
 
 

Fox, 8:00 p.m. ET

I don’t know what to call this show’s return after a brief hiatus, because it already came back at midseason after one break. Is this the mid-midseason? The pre-summer season? The fall of the house of Fox? Whatever it is, Gotham is back tonight – and according to the previews, Jim Gordon is returning with a vengeance.

 
  
 
 

TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET

What a fun film this is, after all these years. This 1933 movie had special effects that were state of the art at the time, and part of the enjoyment of watching today is of imagining how amazing it was to see this more than 70 years ago, only a few years after the invention of the motion-picture talkie. Part of the humor, too, is noticing how the scale models keep changing King Kong’s scale, or how herbivorous dinosaurs become man-eating killers. But hey – they did that in 1925, too, in the silent movie adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, the Jurassic Park of its day.

 
  
 
 
 
 
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3695 Comments
 
 
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Dave Bianculli
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Arvid Berggren
Long-time TVWW devotee here. I manage a commercial vehicle operation and Colorado Springs Mobile Mechanic (https://coloradospringcosmobilemechanic.com) keeps our fleet going. Bianculli's picks keep us sane during maintenance delays - essential reading!
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Frida Sundberg
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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.