AMC, 8:00 p.m. ET
This 1992 comedy is such a funny, enjoyable legal comedy, it’s easy to overlook how dependent it is on the broad comic talents of its two stars, Marisa Tomei (who won an Oscar for her portrayal) and Joe Pesci (who perhaps should have). He plays the title character, a newly minted New York lawyer defending his cousin, who is accused of murder in rural Alabama. Oh, and give credit, too, to Fred Gwynne, who plays the judge who has a problem with Vinny’s wardrobe, attitude, and accent. “Yutes?”
National Geographic, 9:00 p.m. ET
All this week, National Geographic Channel has been filming in Yellowstone National Park, augmented freshly filmed pieces with live telecasts, and following different creatures at different parts of the park. Some of the more breakout natural stars, all week, have been hidden inside a beaver lodge: a quartet of young, weeks-old kits, photographed with their mother with an infrared camera mounted inside the lodge itself. All this week, I’ve been making animal puns – but for this final day of this fascinating live documentary miniseries, rather than strain for one more Yellowstone joke, I’ll just leave it to beavers…
NBC, MSNBC, Telemundo, 9:00 p.m. ET
The numbers for this year’s field of Democratic hopefuls competing for the party’s 2020 nomination for the presidency is so swollen, the Democratic National Committee and the NBC family of networks established an unprecedented series of stipulations and guidelines for these first debates of the 2020 election process. The 20 hopefuls who met the guidelines, regarding either percentages in certain polls or political donations in a certain number of states, get to take place in a televised either tonight or tomorrow night – with the participants for each night selected randomly. That’s why, of the top five politicians in the current polls, only one of them, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, is on stage tonight. Luck of the draw. She and nine other hopefuls, including former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, will be fielding questions from the moderators. And there are five of those, including Chuck Todd, Lester Holt, and Rachel Maddow.
