ABC, 8:00 p.m. ET
This is a warning, not a recommendation. It’s worth noting, however, that ABC’s The Bachelor has been playing video matchmaker for almost two decades now – since 2002. Because ABC sometimes crammed two cycles of Bachelor dating into a single season, that means the network already has produced and televised 24 editions of The Bachelor. Edition 25 is scheduled to premiere next year, in 2021, but how you stage and produce The Bachelor post-pandemically is beyond me. Then again, this show, as well as its appeal, has always been, to me (if I can quote the King of Siam in The King and I) a puzzlement. But without any new Bachelor cycle in production, or in sight, ABC is filling tonight’s prime-time summer schedule by presenting a “highlights” special of the past two dozen Bachelor editions. It’s calling the program The Bachelor: The Greatest Seasons – Ever!, and I haven’t seen it. Nor do I plan to. For one thing, I wrote a TV column way, way back in the late 1970s, listing how to avoid bad TV by looking for 10 advance warning signs. One of them was to avoid all shows with exclamation marks in their titles, which remains a generally sound rule. For another thing, I wondered, with a one-hour special devoted to The Greatest Seasons – Ever! of The Bachelor, how in the world ABC would manage to fill an entire 60-minute time block. Then, to my amazement, I looked at the ABC schedule for tonight and found, to my astonishment, that this Bachelor “highlights” special is not one hour, or two hours – but three. Three. Run away! Run away!
Freeform, 8:30 p.m. ET
Writer-director John Hughes absolutely nailed the American cultural zeitgeist with this 1986 comedy, which stars Matthew Broderick as a high schooler with lots of brains and savvy, but very little motivation or respect for authority. Alan Ruck and Mia Sara play his cohorts in skipping school for a day, and some of the most memorable of Bueller’s moments come courtesy of the actors playing the exasperated authority figures Bueller leaves behind in his wake. Jeffrey Jones, for one. And Ben Stein, absolutely, for another. “Bueller? Bueller??”