Bravo, 7:00 p.m. ET
On tonight’s new, two-hour edition, host James Lipton celebrates his 250th show, and does so by inviting several guests for interviews in front of his students – guests who include Silver Linings Playbook co-stars Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro, Conan O’Brien, and Hugh Jackman. The 250 show mark is significant: Given Lipton’s penchant for asking the same questions to end each interviews, that’s a lot of “favorite swear words” on the record for posterity.
Showtime, 7:30 p.m. ET
Sometime, during the filming of this 2000 movie remake of the miniseries Traffik, director Steven Soderbergh asked star Michael Douglas if he had ever thought of playing Liberace, and Douglas, who hadn’t, offered up an instant impression. Thirteen years later, the two collaborated on last weekend’s HBO biography of Liberace, Behind the Candelabra. So by getting stuck in Traffic tonight, you also can enjoy an earlier collaboration by these two maverick moviemakers.
CBS, 8:00 p.m. ET
SERIES PREMIERE: This new CBS series, which takes 10 amateur chefs and has them compete each week in three contests to assess their abilities as amateur bakers, is based on a hot series from the U.K. – so don’t dismiss it out of hand. Cooking-show imports, either adapted or acquired wholesale, include one of my all-time faves, the original Japanese Iron Chef. And The American Baking Competition is hosted, in this incarnation, by Jeff Foxworthy, who’s proven himself quite adept at this stuff, most recently with GSN’s American Bible Challenge. And on this competition show, the plot doesn’t thicken. It rises.
Encore, 8:00 p.m. ET
This 1957 Elvis Presley movie includes the title production number, which stands alone as one of the best pre-MTV music “videos” ever made. Going to a party at the county jail…
PBS, 9:00 p.m. ET
Nova has been doing more and more of these “instant specials,” keyed to recent news events, and it’s a very smart move. Finding ways to explore the science behind headlines is a way in to stories about floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, blackouts – and, in this case, federal investigations of recent crimes. The April 15 bombing of the Boston Marathon is examined in tonight’s episode, showing in detail how investigators used some modern tools, and discarded others, to isolate and identify the alleged perpetrators. Check local listings.