WEDNESDAY
JULY 8
2015

BIANCULLI’S BEST BETS

 

ESPN, 8:00 a.m. ET

All four of the top men’s seeds play today – including No. 1 seed Novak Djokovic, who will be playing singles championship tennis at Wimbledon for the third consecutive day. After falling two sets down to No. 14 seed Kevin Anderson Monday in a fiercely competitive match, Djokovic rallied to tie the match at two sets apiece, only to have the game suspended because of impending darkness. Anderson and Djokovic returned to play their final set yesterday, with Djokovic prevailing in another tough, tense matchup, finally taking that final set 7-5. And now, today, Djokovic has to play yet again, squaring off against No. 9 seed Marin Cilic. Also today, No. 2 seed, Roger Federer, plays No. 12 Gilles Simon, and No. 4 seed, Stan Wawrinka, plays No. 21 seed, Richard Gasquet. Most games will be televised live by ESPN – but matches played on Center Court will be covered by ESPN2. That’s where to find, at the start of today’s coverage, Federer's match -- but ESPN starts with what may be the day’s most emotional match: Wimbledon favorite Andy Murray, seeded No. 3, vs. Vasek Posposil, ranked No. 56. When Murray (pictured) plays on Centre Court, the local crowd goes crazy.

 
  
 
 

IFC, 9:00 p.m. ET

MINISERIES PREMIERE: This sequel to last year’s IFC comedy miniseries, The Spoils of Babylon, embraces the same goofy conceit – to equally winning but weird effect. Will Ferrell plays Eric Jonrosh, a late-period, low-rent Orson Welles-ish filmmaker equally besotted by booze and his own inflated ego. Once again, Jonrosh introduces and summarizes each episode, appearing (while drinking, eating and complaining) as a framing device to present the long-delayed premiere of his long-dormant “filmitization” of his own overblown novel. The Spoils of Babylon was a soap opera spoof in the vein of Giant; The Spoils Before Dying is a 1950s film noir spoof, starring Maya Rudolph and Kristin Wiig as jazz songbirds, one of whom is murdered. Other featured players include Michael Sheen, Kate McKinnon, Haley Joel Osment and Tim Robbins, and the star, playing jazzman turned detective Rock Banyon, is Michael K. Williams. He’s one of the two big surprises here, because his previous roles, as Omar in The Wire and Chalky in Boardwalk Empire, have been searingly tough and no-nonsense. Here, even while playing it straight, he’s all nonsense, committing to the concept fully. The other major surprise is Wiig, when she gets to sing. The lyrics (also purportedly by multi-hyphenate Jonrosh, the alleged writer and director of Dying) are absurd – but her singing voice, as a jazz chanteuse, is lilting and lovely. Both these Spoils spoofs are directed by Matt Piedmont and written by Andrew Steele, the team also behind the Ferrell-Wiig teaming in the recent Lifetime movie, A Deadly Adoption. But that effort, so straight-faced it was indistinguishable from any other cookie-cutter crazy-woman Lifetime melodrama, was not at all enjoyable, whether it was a spoof or an homage. A Deadly Adoption was bad bad. The Spoils Before Dying is good bad…

 
  
 
 

Comedy Central, 10:00 p.m. ET

SEASON PREMIERE: Season 5 of this increasingly assured sketch series begins tonight, and Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key are as thoughtful, daring and funny as ever. The only difference, this season, is one of format: No more appearances before a live audience to introduce sketches. And that’s a good change, because these two, like the repertory company of SCTV, shine most when they disappear into their wildly diverse characters. And this season, we not only get Barack Obama’s “Anger Translator,” but one for Hillary Clinton as well.

 
  
 
 

TCM, 10:00 p.m. ET

TCM’s two-day salute to Technicolor, on its 100th birthday, continues all day today and tonight – and to me, it’s crowned by a showing of this 1959 Alfred Hitchcock thriller, a masterpiece of images, plotting, pacing and acting. Cary Grant plays a Madison Avenue advertising executive forced to run for his life across the country, in the same general direction, after being mistaken for a secret agent and pursued by foreign spies. It’s fun to imagine Jon Hamm, as Don Draper, in a remake – but North by Northwest is one movie that never needs remade. It’s perfect as is. Eva Marie Saint, James Mason and Leo G. Carroll co-star.

 
  
 
 

Comedy Central, 10:30 p.m. ET

SERIES PREMIERE: This new series is produced and put together so closely to its air date that no episode will be available for preview. So prejudging this new series is tricky. On the one hand, it’s a vehicle for Hannibal Buress, whose outspokenness about the allegations surrounding Bill Cosby put that long-simmering issue on boil – and whose Comedy Central appearance at the recent roast of Justin Bieber was hilarious (he told Bieber, to his face, “I hate your music more than Bill Cosby hates my comedy”). On the other hand, promos for Why?, showing Buress vamping in a fake audition to replace Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, weren’t inspired or amusing at all. But we’ll see which Buress we’ll get, beginning tonight. It’s worth a tune-in to find out.
 
  
 
 

Crackle, 11:30 p.m. ET

SEASON FINALE: Season 6 (hard to believe it’s been that long) of Jerry Seinfeld’s pitch-perfect web series concludes with a very special guest: Stephen Colbert, bearded and loose in the transition period between The Colbert Report and The Late Show. Seinfeld even lets Colbert drive, taking a turn behind the wheel of Seinfeld’s 1964 Morgan Plus 4 Roadster. Colbert hasn’t driven a manual transmission in quite a while, and it may be the only time you could accurately describe Colbert as shiftless… Or, at least, grinding it out.
 
  
 
 
 
 
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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.