TCM, 6:45 p.m. ET
There are all sorts of fun horror movies on TCM today and tomorrow and Saturday, celebrating Halloween – but this one, from 1960, deserves special notice. It’s the Roger Corman film that, eventually, spawned a hot off-Broadway musical, and a popular movie musical as well. In this original version, watch for the then-unknown young actor playing a dentist’s masochistic patient. The actor is… Jack Nicholson.
Fox, 8:00 p.m. ET
This one-night crossover pairing, of the supernatural series Sleepy Hollow and the forensics procedural Bones, sounds almost laughably unlikely. But when you look closely at the chemistry of each show’s leading couple, you see the similarities, especially with the mismatched personalities and playful verbal jabs. Tonight, that two-way chemistry becomes a foursome – but only comically, not physically.
ABC, 8:00 p.m. ET
After A Charlie Brown Christmas, this 1966 cartoon is the best Peanuts special ever made. Both of them, in very different ways, are about the importance of faith. For Halloween, that seems an out-of-place message, yet Linus, in the pumpkin patch, is like a grade-school Fox Mulder: He wants to believe.
CBS, 8:25 p.m. ET
The New England Patriots are undefeated, this far into the season – and tonight, face AFC division rivals the Miami Dolphins, who are only a .500 team this year. However, the Dolphins are undefeated since they dismissed their losing coach, Joe Philbin, and have won the last two games in uncharacteristically dominant fashion. My heart is rooting for the Dolphins – but my head, and the years of history of the Dolphins having their dreams crushed by the Patriots, say the advantage goes to the home team. The Patriots host.
TCM, 11:45 p.m. ET
All this month on Tuesdays and Thursdays, TCM has saluted women directors – and tonight’s final dip into that well brings us the most recent films in its female moviemaking sampler. Newest of all, and unusually recent for a TCM offering, is this film from 2008: Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, starring Jeremy Renner as a munitions expert faced with the potentially deadly duty of defusing bombs during the Iraq War.