FRIDAY
APRIL 6
2018

BIANCULLI’S BEST BETS

 

Netflix, 3:00 a.m. ET

The fourth installment of David Letterman’s Netflix talk show features Jay-Z, with a side trip to record producer Rick Rubin and a recording session with Madison Ryann Ward, one of the artists Rubin is producing. The conversational chunks with Jay-Z are really intriguing, and Jay-Z has a shrewd way of responding to certain questions – by reshaping the question and throwing it back at his host. When Letterman asks Jay-Z which of his popular hip-hop peers just can’t rap, Jay-Z smiles and asks him which of today’s late-night talk hosts just aren’t funny. But many questions, Jay-Z does answer – about the creation of rhymes, his youthful occupations as both running a paper route and dealing drugs, his mother, and his family, including his wife, Beyoncé. And near the end, Letterman gets more personal than he usually does, and talks about the time his bad behavior blew up his family – then asks Jay-Z if he can relate.

 
  
 
 

ABC, 9:01 p.m. ET

It’s a team effort now, S.H.I.E.L.D. and H.Y.D.R.A., working together for the first time, against something bigger and worse than them both. (No, it’s not Y.I.C.U.F.O., which was the name of the flying-saucer investigation group I organized in high school, and for which I successfully was recognized by the Air Force’s similarly obsessed Project Blue Book. That acronym stood for the Youth Investigations Committee on Unidentified Flying Objects, and I established it as a very sneaky way to get published in my high school paper and start my career in journalism. First I shot a fake photo of a flying saucer [actually, one of my dad’s floppy fishing hats, thrown into the air at a neighborhood park], then, as a cub reporter for the Nova Vue, took the alleged flying saucer photo to the head of Y.I.C.U.F.O. – who wanted to remain anonymous, obviously – and who declared it an obvious fake. Fake news! But my favorite hidden joke, in that story, was what it sounded like if you said aloud the organization’s initials: Y.I.C.U.F.O.! But I digress…)

 
  
 
 

TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET

Every time I teach Film History and Appreciation, covering the early development of cinema up to and including Citizen Kane, I show this 1932 Tod Browning movie, made only a handful of years after the first full-length sound film. It’s a beautiful horror film about a circus sideshow troupe, in which the abnormal performers gathered for the amusement of audiences – the midgets, pinheads, Siamese twins and others – are the sweet and loving heroes, and the conniving human circus performers are the actual “freaks.” This movie, once seen, will never be forgotten.

 
  
 
 

HBO, 10:00 p.m. ET

I won’t list all of tonight’s guests, but will point out three – and taken together, they’d be unlikely to appear together in almost any other context, off or on TV. The announced guests for tonight’s show include Louie Anderson, Eliot Spitzer, and (pictured) Geraldo Rivera.

 
  
 
 
 
 
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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.