Various Networks, Check local listings
Last night’s opening of the Republican Convention was mostly on tape, with much official convention business occurring (and, on some cable networks, televised) earlier in the day. Donald Trump made two prime-time appearances, each time playing host, and interviewer, to a small group of people invited and assembled to tell their stories and praise their president: first responders and other workers in one group, freed international hostages in the other. (The second one, pictured, was cringeworthy, especially because of Trump’s fawning remarks about their captors.) Trump will find a way to appear in prime-time every night during this convention, not just for his Thursday night speech. Last night, Donald Trump Jr. also spoke in a pre-recorded speech, and tonight will feature more family members.
HBO, 10:00 p.m. ET
This is the third episode of Hard Knocks, and the two Los Angeles football teams have suffered some hard knocks indeed. One coach contracted COVID and recovered before the preseason training began, while another tested positive in the opening days of training and was sent home for a two-week quarantine – only to discover, with a second test, that his earlier test had generated a false positive. Players have spent weeks walking through plays without contact, then finally began a more physical type of scrimmage, but with plastic shields affixed to their helmets, and electronic equipment that monitored whether they were socially distanced in a proper way between plays. In this week’s episode, we get closer to the “real thing,” but with many, many questions about how, and whether, games will be played.
Decades, 1:00 a.m. ET
Yesterday I raved about the arrival of Brooklyn Bridge, Gary David Goldberg’s fabulous 1991 period comedy about a Jewish family in 1950s Brooklyn. Decades is repeating this series, almost never seen on TV since its original run, weeknights at 1 a.m. ET. A horribly inconvenient time for such a rare television treasure, but set your recorder if you can, because each episode is a true treat. Tonight, for example, is the conclusion of the one-hour pilot begun last night, which contains a fabulous scene in which the young boy at the center of the show, Alan Silver (played by Danny Gerard), is taken by his loving grandfather (Louis Zorich) to meet one of his heroes, Brooklyn Dodger Gil Hodges (guest star Jeffrey Nordling). It’s a sweetly touching scene in a series that’s full of them. Marion Ross is a quiet revelation as the boy’s grandmother, Sophie.