THURSDAY
APRIL 27
2017

BIANCULLI’S BEST BETS

 

CBS, 8:00 p.m. ET

Part of the success of The Big Bang Theory is due to its fidelity to itself. It pays attention to its characters, and their interactions, and even their pasts, and adjusts accordingly. Penny (Kaley Cuoco) began the series as an airheaded neighbor, a bubbly blonde object of unattainable desire. But she quickly deepened as a character, showing sides of herself as both a frustrated wannabe actress and a sarcastic have-to-work waitress. Her on-again, off-again mating dance with neighbor Leonard (Johnny Galecki) took years, literally, to come to fruition – and recently, Penny’s past was revisited when a former boyfriend, Zach (Brian Thomas Smith), made an untimely reappearance, representing the sort of hunky stupid guys she used to date, as opposed to her current brainy scientist husband. Tonight, because the Big Bang writers always seem to know good things when they stumble on them, Zach returns again – this time with a job offer for Penny that may be the type of offer she can’t refuse.

 
  
 
 

NBC, 8:30 p.m. ET

Don’t look for it, it’s gone. This was the night and time slot the newest episode of NBC’s Powerless sitcom was scheduled to air – but the network just pulled it from the schedule, replacing it with a doubleheader of Superstore instead. The reason I’m stubbornly keeping Powerless, which starred Vanessa Hudgens as a worker drone in a DC Comics comedy where all the costumed superheroes are offscreen peripheral characters, in Best Bets tonight is because of what would have been tonight’s plot. Lois Lane dies. And the characters in Powerless, savvy to the tropes of comic-book death scenes, surmise that Superman is about to spin around the Earth fast enough, in reverse rotation, to somehow reverse time, to a point where Lois was still alive – and save her. It’s an actual plot from an old comic (and movie) – but in the Powerless universe, the characters realize that, in the window between Lois Lane’s death and Superman’s sure-to-come time-reversal heroics, they can do anything they want, anything at all, without any lasting consequences. That’s a really clever spin on the old reversing-time idea – and if I had the power, I’d spin the planet backwards to before NBC’s cancellation announcement of Powerless, so we could see tonight’s episode. Eventually, I’m guessing, NBC will burn off the remaining episodes somewhere, so we’ll get to see them – but that’s sometime in the future. Hey, wait a minute… If Superman were to fly clockwise around Earth, would that propel us onto the future? If so, we could see Powerless… now. Because it would be now, then.

 
  
 
 

CW, 9:00 p.m. ET

More comic-book strangeness: This bizarre CW adaptation of the Archie comic books, with its darker tone and characters, is up to episode 11 out of this season’s 13, so we’re nearing whatever cliffhanger the writers have in store. Meanwhile, tonight, there are some sparks between Fred and Mary, whose renewed chemistry might have them rethinking their divorce. They’re played by two teen-idol icons from a previous generation: series regular Luke Perry and recurring guest star Molly Ringwald (who, in tonight’s episode, is Pretty in Black).

 
  
 
 

CNN, 10:00 p.m. ET

This new CNN documentary series, looking at some of the connections between music and real life, continues tonight with music associated with New York and the events of 9/11. Among them is a fresh Billy Joel interview, in which he recalls performing “New York State of Mind” for an audience of invited firefighters, with a fireman’s helmet placed on his piano to help him focus. “It was like a dirge,” he says of that particular song’s pace that evening – and boy, is it an effective anthem.

 
  
 
 

Comedy Central, 11:30 p.m. ET

SERIES PREMIERE: Improv comedian Anthony Atamanuik has been impersonating Donald Trump for a while now, at the Upright Citizens Brigade and elsewhere – including a Comedy Central guest appearance that led to this gig. I haven’t seen the premiere of this new weekly series, which is being taped as close to air as possible to ride the waves of the real President Trump’s insanely rapid news pace – but I give the advance promo high marks for capturing Trump’s speech patterns as perfectly as Tina Fey nailed Sarah Palin’s. Atamanuik’s Trump, speaking of tonight’s premiere, promises: “I’ll have the best guests, the most beautiful women. It’ll be so funny – the most funny show.” Let’s see…
 
  
 
 
 
 
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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.