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FRIDAY
JULY 3
2020

BIANCULLI’S BEST BETS

 
HAMILTON

Disney+, 3:00 a.m. ET

MOVIE PREMIERE: Lin-Manual Miranda’s cultural phenomenon of a musical, Hamilton, opened at the Public Theater in 2015, moved uptown to Broadway later that same year, and won 11 Tonys. In June 2016 – the week before those Tonys were awarded – Miranda and his co-stars filmed Hamilton three times for a future movie. It was filmed twice with an audience, once on a closed-theater Monday so cameras could roam and swoop freely on and above the stage. The plan was to release the movie in the fall of 2021, but the pandemic changed release plans, and Disney+ streams the movie today as a special Independence Day weekend treat. It’s a fabulous film version, capturing the original cast in top form, and I suspect this programming stunt will end up being one of the major, and most successful, TV events of the year. For my full review on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, listen to today’s Fresh Air, or wait until later this afternoon and visit the Fresh Air website.
 
  
 
 
THE SEARCHERS

TCM, 10:00 p.m. ET

Director John Ford made many wonderful movies, in several different genres, but this 1956 film may be his best Western, and anyone’s. A family’s home and ranch is attacked by a Comanche raiding party, and the marauders massacre everyone but the youngest daughter, who is taken prisoner. Her uncle Ethan, played by John Wayne, and her adopted brother Martin, played by Jeffrey Hunter, set out in search of her – a search that ends up taking years. And what complicates the quest, and (in a good way) the movie, is that Wayne’s Ethan is a Civil War veteran from the Confederate side, deeply bigoted, especially against Native Americans. The longer the Indians elude him, the more his hatred rises, which ends up affecting the rescue mission in very unpredictable ways. The searchers move across seasons and lands, and director Ford makes great use of it all, particularly of the Monument Valley vistas he made famous in his movies. Natalie Wood plays the long-abducted young woman, giving a potent performance – and Wayne, showing some very dark shades, was never better.
 
  
 
 
THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW – NOW IN LIVING COLOR! A SPECIAL TRIBUTE TO CARL REINER!

CBS, 8:00 p.m. ET

The newly colorized episodes shown tonight in what CBS is calling its Tribute to Carl Reiner have been shown by the network in prime time before: “October Eve,” in which Reiner plays an artist who paints Mary Tyler Moore’s Laura Petrie in the nude, was shown in color tones in 2017. (For the record: Laura wasn’t nude. The artist just painted her that way from his imagination.) And the show’s classic “Coast to Coast Big Mouth” episode, in which Laura reveals to a national TV audience that her husband’s boss, Reiner’s Alan Brady, is bald, was shown by CBS, in living color, in 2016. But they’re always worth watching – especially as we remember Carl after his death Monday, at age 98.

 

 
  
 
 
 
 
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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.
 
 
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