NBC, 8:00 p.m. ET
Poor Community. NBC sat on this season’s shows so long that the episode premiering tonight actually was intended for the last week in October. That’s why, on Valentine’s Day, Community is going with a special Halloween episode – equal parts trick and treat, considering. One highlight: an in-costume road trip to Pierce’s mysterious mansion, where some of the gang discovers his unusually equipped “secret gym.”
CBS, 8:00 p.m. ET
On CBS, on this sitcom, there is a Valentine’s Day episode for Valentine’s Day. And while all the male characters are approaching the holiday awkward, no one out-awkwards Sheldon (Jim Parsons), who woos Amy (Mayim Bialik) – but grudgingly.
ABC, 8:00 p.m. ET
SERIES PREMIERE: It’s out of respect for Anthony Edwards’ prior work that I note the arrival of this new series. Otherwise, it’s a messy, convoluted, uninvolving attempt to mount a TV version of
The Da Vinci Code, with a plot that includes clocks with clues, Nazis with clones, FBI agents with curves, and demon babies with colic. Okay, I made up that last part – but only the part about the colic. For Ed Bark’s very negative full-length review, see
Uncle Barky’s Bytes.
TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET
Still ranked as the highest-rated theatrical movie ever to be broadcast on television, Gone with the Wind gets a prime-time showing tonight, but in a different media landscape. NBC’s 1976 two-part telecast of this 1939 Civil War epic, starring Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara, still ranks at the bottom of TV’s all-time Top 10 – but that was in the last year before home video recorders were introduced, via the Sony Betamax, and before HBO caught on as a national cable outlet for unedited, uninterrupted movies. Now Scarlett and company are slipped into a midweek slot on TCM, with little fanfare – but hey, on TCM, it’s still unedited and uninterrupted. And on TCM, it’s shown all on one night. So enjoy. By the time it’s over, tomorrow is another day.
Lifetime, 9:00 p.m. ET
The guest judge on tonight’s show is Bette Midler, whose tongue and taste are sharp enough to anticipate, with glee, what she might say to the budding fashion designers who most – and least – impress her.