Netflix, 3:00 a.m. ET
MOVIE PREMIERE: The other day, TCM televised 1941’s Citizen Kane. Today, Netflix premieres a new movie about the making of that classic Orson Welles film. Welles starred in the title role, directed the film, and is credited with co-writing the screenplay. This new film, though, focuses on the other credited co-writer: Herman L. Mankiewicz. Gary Oldman stars as Mankiewicz, a.k.a. Mank, and the other players in Mank include Charles Dance as tycoon William Randolph Hearst and Amanda Seyfried as actress Marion Davies, the media baron and his mistress who were at the center of the thinly veiled character assassination that was Citizen Kane. David Fincher directs, Jack Fincher writes the Mank screenplay, and Tom Burke plays the younger, thinner Orson Welles.
TBS, 8:00 p.m. ET
Somewhere after this 1983 holiday movie came out, Ted Turner’s TBS and TNT networks began running marathons of A Christmas Story, making it an improbable but heartwarming annual Christmas treat. Here it comes again… and not for the last time this season, either. Not by a long shot – a long shot from a Red Ryder BB gun.