DOCUMENTARY PREMIERE: Jon Alpert has been making nonfiction films since 1980, including the unforgettable 2007 HBO project, Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq, which was hosted by James Gandolfini, who conducted interviews with veteran soldiers who were lucky to be alive. For even longer than he’s been making movies, Alpert has been visiting Cuba, and his new film, Cuba and the Cameraman, distills his footage and interviews from 45 years’ worth of occasional trips to the long-out-of-reach island. It’s no puff piece: Alpert is keenly interested in how Communist support since the Fidel Castro-led revolution has dwindled, making it even harder on local citizens to make ends meet – much less, in some instances, to find and buy meat. And Alpert keeps returning not only to the same country, but to some of the same people, making Cuba and the Cameraman a sort of Caribbean version of that 14 Up documentary film series. Or of Boyhood.

SEASON PREMIERE: This is Season 2 of this period action piece, a co-production of Canada’s Discovery Channel and Netflix. It’s about the fur trade of the 1700s in North America, and how one determined outlaw – Declan Harp, whose heritage is both Native American and Irish – continually challenges and thwarts the economic dominance of the Hudson Bay Company’s monopoly on the fur trade. And the reason there is a Season 2 of Frontier, basically, is because of the rising star who plays Declan Harp. He’s Jason Momoa, who played Khal Drogo in HBO’s Game of Thrones, and has portrayed Aquaman in both Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and the current Justice League, with his own Aquaman movie slated for next year. (I guess I believe it, but to me, it sounds a little fishy…)

It’s the day after Thanksgiving, and all through the house, the networks already are beginning to roll out Christmas specials like a landslide of holiday perennials. That’s not so much because TV wants to distract us from Black Friday – if you watch any television with advertising, quite the contrary – but because there’s such a backlog of Christmas specials that unless the networks begin showing them immediately after Thanksgiving, they’ll never have time to televise them all. Tonight, NBC leads off with one of my favorite Christmas specials, which CBS televised originally, back in 1966. Cartoon genius Chuck Jones brings the characters and visuals of Dr. Seuss’ story to life, and Boris Karloff narrates the story – but does not sing “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.”  That song is sung by an uncredited performer named Thurl Ravenscroft.

This Christmas special from the same decade – specifically, from 1969 – isn’t as good, and isn’t on my list of favorite TV Christmas specials. The writer, Romeo Muller, expands the popular holiday song into a passable narrative, as he had with another early TV holiday special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. But face it: Neither of those is A Charlie Brown Christmas. But at least Jimmy Durante narrates, which counts for something.

SPECIAL PREMIERE: Producer Ken Ehrlich has been overseeing fabulous performance pairings at the Grammys for decades, and is one of the most tasteful and, at times daring, music producers on television. (He also, he told me once, got every performer to sign a personal scrapbook for him, often with scraps of their own lyrics, which must be an amazing book by now.) At Ehrlich’s first Grammys show, he paired Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond for a live performance of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” so expect that to be here in this two-hour retrospective. Also look for Prince and Beyoncé teaming on a Purple Rain medley in 2004 (pictured), and, speaking of medleys, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl and Joe Walsh performing the medley from Abbey Road. If they aren’t here in this two-hour special, along with Whitney Houston and Alicia Keys, then I’ll be not only surprised, but profoundly disappointed. John Legend and Carrie Underwood co-host.