Public Television, 7:00 p.m. ET
(Friday - Sunday, Check Local Listings) Tonight’s guest is Neal Gabler, the long-time movie critic who asserts that the current Republican presidential contestant is playing out like a movie. He’s close, but wrong. As we all know, it’s playing out like a reality-TV show. Or, at worst, the equivalent of speed dating, where every candidate gets a few minutes in the spotlight before being coldly rejected. (And I’ve never even tried speed-dating. But I can imagine.)
ABC, 8:00 p.m. ET
One of the people standing before the sharks tonight is a woman who needs an infusion of cash in order to keep her gourmet pretzel business afloat. And you can be sure, that if one of these sharks bite, and agree to go in on the pretzel business, their offer will come with a twist.
Fox, 9:00 p.m. ET
Tonight’s episode is called “The End of All Things,” and the show does vanish after tonight – but only for a brief respite. And it has to do with the Observers – one in particular, played by Michael Cerveris – and an attempt at a particularly daring rescue.
PBS, 9:00 p.m. ET
This Tony-winning musical was filmed before a live audience at the Schubert Theater, resulting in this 2011 film. It’s a love story about an interracial romance in the 1950s South, starring Chad Kimball as a deejay (the old-fashioned kind, the ones who played records on the radio) and Montego Glover as his musical and emotional muse.
TCM, 10:00 p.m. ET
Made in 1951, this movie is jaw-droppingly prescient, and bitingly cynical, about the hunger by the media to exploit an individual tragedy and turn it into national theater. There’s a cave-in at a mine, and reporter Kirk Douglas sees his coverage of it as a way to work his way back to the journalistic big time. The reigning media at the time is radio – but swap out the radio mike for TV cameras, and Douglas for CNN or MSNBC or Fox News or any other 24-hour TV news operation, and you’ve got a very familiar, very modern tale.