ABC Family, 8:00 p.m. ET
I adore this 2008 animated film, which takes great narrative risks, and emerges with incomparably rich rewards. Along with such much more serious movies as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner and A Clockwork Orange, it deserves to be discussed, in the same breath, as one of the best science-fiction movies ever made. If you don’t believe me, watch it – or watch it again.
BBC America, 9:00 p.m. ET
BBC America sure isn’t making it easy for me to keep trying to persuade the uninitiated of the intrinsic value of Doctor Who – not with a title for a Who special that’s as fanciful as this one. (It reminds me of trying, all those years ago, to insist to my understandably dubious friends that a show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer was truly TV worth watching.) Timey-Wimey is cute Whovian for time travel, and this new special examines all the trips back to the future, and to the past and present, that the Doctor and his companions have taken over the years – millions of them. And if I haven’t persuaded you to tune in by now, I won’t waste any more of your timey-wimey. Or any more of miney.
BBC America, 10:00 p.m. ET
Chris Hardwick and his fellow nerds spend this new hour of The Nerdist presenting A Tribute to Time Travel. They’ll take their time with it, no doubt – but just as doubtlessly, it’ll all be over in an hour.
Science Channel, 10:00 p.m. ET
This installment covers something more than 40 years old, but still unforgettably creepy. I remember when news of this got out when it happened, and perhaps you do, too. At Stanford University in 1971, Phillip Zombardo’s “Stanford Prison Experiment” randomly assigned some college students as guards, and others as prisoners, then monitored them secretly to see how long it would take either the guards or prisoners to rebel as those in charge were instructed to treat their “captives” more and more ruthlessly. The shocking thing was, none of the students demanded to quit – and this account of that experiment’s results, and its ramifications, are explored in this new documentary.
TCM, 4:30 a.m. ET
It’s Freddie Bartholomew day on TCM, an all-day salute that includes, in prime time, two favorites: 1937’s Captains Courageous at 8 p.m. ET, and 1938’s Kidnapped at 10:15 p.m. ET. The rarity, though, arrives very late at night, when Bartholomew makes a camera appearance, as himself, in a 1947 musical that’s rarely televised: Sepia Cinderella, a film aimed primarily at black audiences, and including lots of nightclub acts popular at the time.