Netflix, 3:00 a.m. ET
SEASON PREMIERE: This new menu of Netflix’s Chef’s Table is all about barbecue, and, like earlier seasons of this satisfying series, is much more about personality and biography than recipes and ingredients. The first show presented for this new season, on Snow’s BBQ pitmaster Tootsie Tomanetz, nearly brought me to tears – and not just because of the sight, and the imagined aroma, of her using a mop to slather overpopulated racks of brisket and pork ribs in her natural wood fire pits. “Tootsie” turned 85 earlier this year, in the midst of the pandemic, but still labors over the hot smokers that turned her little place in Lexington – not the city in Kentucky, but the small 1,000-resident hamlet in Texas – into a BBQ operation recently voted the best in that entire, barbecue-crazy state. When I was through watching the show, I was so moved by Tootsie’s personality and perseverance, I really, really wanted to sample her ribs. And it turns out you can: One of the ways she’s surviving these COVID-wary times is to offer certain menu items for nationwide shipping. That’s my reaction to only the first of this season’s Chef’s Table programs. I’m pacing myself, though, because I’m not sure either my diet or my wallet can afford the rest in one major viewing spurt. That would seem to redefine the term “binge-watching.”
TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET
Four films directed by Bob Fosse are televised tonight on TCM. They’re not presented chronologically – but if you record all four and wait to watch them until tomorrow or after, you can watch them in the order Fosse directed them, and watch how his artistry, confidence and originality increases over the years. Sweet Charity, the earliest of the four Fosse movies shown here (it was his cinematic debut as a director), does indeed start the evening at 8 p.m. ET, starring Shirley MacLaine as a so-called “taxi dancer” in Fosse’s 1969 big-screen version of the musical. Fosse not only serves double duty as choreographer, but choreographs his camera placements and editing pace as well. He displayed those gifts with even more dynamism three years later in 1972’s Cabaret, starring Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey, a movie which TCM withholds until 1 a.m. ET. In between, it shows another of his remaining three directorial film efforts (the only one missing is 1974’s Lenny, starring Dustin Hoffman as Lenny Bruce). At 10:45 p.m. ET, TCM presents the rarely shown, not-available-for-streaming 1979 semibiography All That Jazz, a brilliant film starring Roy Scheider as his alter ego, and Jessica Lange as a spectral observer (pictured). And at 3:15 a.m. ET, after tonight’s late-night showing of Cabaret, TCM presents an even later-night showing of Fosse’s final film, his biography of ill-fated actress Dorothy Stratten (played touchingly by Mariel Hemingway), in 1983’s Star 80.
