THURSDAY
DECEMBER 26
2013

BIANCULLI’S BEST BETS

 

AMC, 5:30 p.m. ET

Here’s an offer you shouldn’t refuse: The two best Godfather movies, the original 1972 film and its brilliant 1974 sequel, shown back to back. You can almost smell the meat sauce simmering. Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, James Caan – what a cast. What a set of films. Francis Ford Coppola directs, delivering the best gangster movies ever, period.

 
  
 
 

Bravo, 7:00 p.m. ET

Bruce Dern, after a film career that stretches back over 50 years, is riding high right now with Oscar talk for his fabulous work in the current film Nebraska. Both he and his daughter Laura also have done fantastic recent work on HBO – he as the bitter dad Frank Harlow on Big Love, she as the driven and redefined Amy Jellicoe of Enlightened. Tonight, in this new edition, James Lipton interviews them both. Expect him to hit all the highlights – including Alfred Hitchcock’s Family Plot and the environmentalist sci-fi classic Silent Running for him, and Jurassic Park and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart for her. That’s a lot to cover right there – but I hope Lipton also touches on Bruce’s early TV work, because his list of credits of Sixties TV guest appearances is amazing. Here’s just a partial list of shows on which he appeared: Route 66, Naked City, Thriller, The Outer Limits, 77 Sunset Strip, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Wagon Train, Rawhide, The Fugitive, Gunsmoke, Then Came Bronson and Land of the Giants. Wow. And his daughter is no TV slouch, either –not with impressive guest spots on Ellen and The West Wing, and starring as Katherine Harris in HBO’s Recount.

 
  
 
 

TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET

Ben Stiller’s vastly reimagined version of the classic James Thurber story, co-starring Kristen Wiig, is in theaters now – so now is a smart time for TCM to present the 1947 version, starring Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo, which stuck much closer to the intentionally restrictive confines of the original story. That story, by the way, was first published in The New Yorker in 1939, eight years before Kaye’s movie was made.

 
  
 
 

ABC, 9:00 p.m. ET

Earlier this year, NBC News presented a prime-time special on vampires in popular culture, just to promote the same-night premiere of its new Dracula series. I gave that the worst show of the year award on Fresh Air, but at least it was promoting one of its own programs. Tonight, ABC News devotes two hours to an attempt to ride the wave of a popular program from a competitor: PBS’s Downton Abbey. I suppose, though, you can’t blame ABC for not trying to cash in on its own hit shows. I’m not sure it has any.

 
  
 
 

TBS, 10:00 p.m. ET

Scrubs and Cougar Town creator Bill Lawrence’s new workplace comedy pairs star Skylar Astin, as Brody, with guest star Anna Camp, making it a mini-reunion from when they played a couple in the musical movie Pitch Perfect. They’re an off-screen couple as well, and tonight’s plot has them engaging in a karaoke war with Brody’s friends. One example: the two of them performing a duet of Britney Spears’ “Baby One More Time.” Meanwhile, I continue to marvel at Camp’s diverse, impressive body of TV work, which ranges, in a few short years, from recurring roles as Bethany on Mad Men and Caitlin on The Good Wife to Cassie on this season’s How I Met Your Mother and the ill-fated, raging Christian cult leader Sarah on True Blood.

 
  
 
 
 
 
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David Bianculli

Founder / Editor

David Bianculli has been a TV critic since 1975, including a 14-year stint at the New York Daily News, and sees no reason to stop now. Currently, he's TV critic for NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and is an occasional substitute host for that show. He's also an author and teaches TV and film history at New Jersey's Rowan University. His 2009 Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of 'The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour', has been purchased for film rights. His latest, The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific, is an effusive guidebook that plots the path from the 1950s’ Golden Age to today’s era of quality TV.