TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET
This 1942 movie comedy, starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in their first, utterly electric screen pairing, is one of the funniest and most insightful movies ever made about the newspaper business. They’re delightful together, and her character is such an early feminist that she’s got to be considered groundbreaking, even given all the strong women in film in the previous decade. Of note, too, is that Oscar-winning screenwriters Ring Lardner, Jr. and Michael Kanin were so young when they wrote Woman of the Year (26 and 31, respectively). Also of note: Lardner subsequently was blacklisted as one of the infamous Hollywood 10, and unable to work, under his own name, for more than a decade. But finally, he not only was able to get on-screen credit for his screenplays again, but to win a second Oscar for writing one: His adapted screenplay for Robert Altman’s 1970 comedy M*A*S*H.
ABC, 9:00 p.m. ET
MINISERIES FINALE: Part 4 of 4. This four-part dramatization of LGBT rights concludes tonight. The ratings haven’t been terrific, but the effort has been a noble one – even for the miniseries as a genre. The broadcast networks almost never attempt this sort of multi-part commitment any more.
HBO, 10:00 p.m. ET
The last time environmental author Bill McKibben was on Real Time with Bill Maher, five years ago (pictured), he memorably told Maher, “We broke the Arctic.” Wonder what he’s going to say in 2017, making a return visit as one of this week’s scheduled guests, just as the Environmental Protection Agency comes under new management.
TCM, 10:00 p.m. ET
This impressively informed parody of the Frankenstein films is only one of the two brilliant movies directed and co-written by Mel Brooks in 1974. (The other is Blazing Saddles. As film vintages go, for Mr. Brooks, not a bad year.) Starring and co-written by the equally gifted Gene Wilder, Young Frankenstein draws liberally, and inspiringly, from several movies in Universal’s Frankenstein canon, and gets the most out of so, so many cast members, from Wilder as the mad Dr. Frankenstein to Marty Feldman as his shifty hunchback assistant, Igor. (Well, his hunchback is shifty: Occasionally, it moves from side to side.) Neither man’s name is pronounced the way you’d expect – but defying expectations, and delighting the audience, is what this movie is all about.
TCM, 4:00 a.m. ET
TCM has saluted the Oscars, for more than a month, by presenting Oscar-winning movies alphabetically, from A to Z – and finally, as the last movie in this very long, entertainingly random celebration, here comes Z. It’s the 1969 French-Algerian film by Costa-Gavras, it’s intensely and overtly political, and it couldn’t be more unsettlingly relevant. Originally presented during the start of the Nixon administration, it’s a drama, and a warning, about how civil liberties and democracy itself can fall if the wrong politicians, with less than noble motives and aggressively right-wing societal visions, conspire to find a way to take control of the government. Yves Montand (pictured), Irene Papas and Jean-Louis Trintignant star – but the real star of this Sixties cinematic polemic is Costa-Gavras himself, whose passion is nothing if not aggressively overt. “Any resemblance to actual events, to persons living or dead,” his film explains at the start, “is not the result of chance. It is DELIBERATE.”
