CBS All Access, 3:00 a.m. ET
SEASON PREMIERE: Season 4 of this always clever Robert and Michelle King series begins with Christine Baranski’s Diane Lockhart experiencing a second of déjà vu – going all the way back to this series’ premiere episode and its opening scene, when she’s watching election returns that fateful night in 2016, watches Donald Trump become elected president, and screams an f-bomb of an expletive. Except this time, as she watches, it’s Hillary Clinton who wins the election, as well as the popular vote, and her scream, is one of joy. The rest of this opening hour of Season 4 has Diane experiencing more and more of that alternate reality, with a wicked cleverness that is not to be missed. (Even the episode’s climax ends on a punch line that’s an all-time classic.) This episode was written and produced by the Kings long before the current pandemic, but the trip down alternate-universe lane is full of mind-blowing moments anyway. Remember that classic finale to Newhart, when Bob Newhart wakes up back in his old bedroom and life of The Bob Newhart Show, and tells his wife Emily about the weird dream he’d just had – a dream that comprised his “life” in Newhart, yet sounded so absurdly unbelievable in the retelling? Well, wait until Diane tries to tell people what the last three years of her life, and ours, have been like…
Hulu, 3:00 a.m. ET
This is the penultimate episode of this enticing, imaginative FX on Hulu miniseries – and it’s the episode when the Devs team cracks its project goal, and devises a way to tap into and witness the time stream of our collective history. The implications are astounding – and writer-director Alex Garland makes the most of them. The music in this series, and this episode, is singularly evocative and eerie. So are the images. And the thoughts, the ideas, are haunting. In one scene, Nick Offerman’s Forest, the architect of this high-tech time-eavesdropping project, looks at early homo sapiens painting on cave walls in France, fast-forwards 5,000 years to see their descendants, in the same cave, painting similar images. He marvels not at the technology allowing him to witness that, but at the slow pace of evolutionary change. “How could nothing have changed in so much time?” he asks. “When I was a kid, the world changed every few years. These days, it changes every few months. Sometimes every few hours.” And boy, if hearing those words, at this exact moment in our time, doesn’t give you the creeps – then you’re all creeped out.
TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET
It’s also a Diane Keaton double feature, if you’re more comfortable with that. Either way, tonight TCM doubles up by showing, in prime time, the two best movies Woody Allen ever made: 1977’s Annie Hall at 8 p.m. ET, followed at 10 p.m. ET by 1979’s Manhattan.
NBC, 9:30 p.m. ET
Tonight’s episode of Will & Grace is a full-out salute to Lucille Ball and I Love Lucy, with three members of the cast taking turns playing Lucy in recreations of various classic I Love Lucy scenarios: The candy factory, the grape stomping, and, yes, the TV commercial for Vitameatavegamin. I just showed that latter episode the other night as part of my Rowan University TV History class – now being taught online, somehow – so time marches on. And the students really enjoyed it. During the most recent TV writers’ strike, I proposed a series in which SNL players and other prominent TV and movie stars would be given the chance to recreate episodes of classic TV shows as a one-shot deal. Since then, ABC has done it twice with episodes of Norman Lear’s 1970s sitcoms, and now this. I’m telling you, again, there’s gold in them thar TV hills…. And the scripts already are written.
Vice, 10:00 p.m. ET
SERIES PREMIERE: Shane Smith, the founder of Vice, has developed an instant series of sorts that takes full advantage of the social distancing mandates prompted by the current pandemic. As Bill Maher and others are quickly learning, what a TV host loses, by having no studio audience, no studio and no in-person guests, can be a gain, by getting remote, “virtual” availability to guests who otherwise might not show, yet are more available than ever at the moment. Tonight, with almost no warning, Smith launches a new series, Shelter in Place with Shane Smith, and starts out by presenting two half-hour installments, each featuring a very special interview guest. First up is whistleblower Edward Snowden, who was sheltered in place long before that was cool (or, in most places, mandatory), followed at 10:30 p.m. ET by California Gov. Gavin Newsome, whose state was among the first to call for restricted movement by American citizens.