Nickelodeon, 7:00 p.m. ET
SPECIAL: When I poll my college students on which TV shows they’ve seen at least one full episode, the standard unanimous answers used to be The Twilight Zone, I Love Lucy, The Andy Griffith Show, and The Honeymooners. But that was a generation ago. These days, those shows rarely have reached more than half of the students in my classrooms, and a show like the original Star Trek has been seen by fewer than 10 percent. But in 2019, what one program is guaranteed to be universally seen and beloved by the 18-to-22-year-olds in my TV history classes? Nickelodeon’s animated classic SpongeBob SquarePants, which in this very meta special celebrates its own 20thanniversary on TV. Creator Stephen Hillenburg died last year, but all the show’s other collaborators and voice actors are here to celebrate SpongeBob’s “birthday” – and without giving too much away, I can hint that many of them will be partying in the flesh, as well as in aquatic animated form at Bikini Bottom…
TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET
All day today, as part of its July tribute to Hollywood’s greatest year, TCM shows movies from the single, spectacular year of 1939. During the day, the range of films spreads from Shirley Temple in The Little Princess at 6:45 a.m. ET to William Powell and Myrna Loy in Another Thin Man at 6:15 p.m. ET. In prime time, only two movies from 1939 are televised, but what movies they are: Bette Davis in Dark Victory at 8 p.m. ET, followed at 10 p.m. ET by Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind (pictured).
ABC, 8:00 p.m. ET
Part 2 of this galactic showdown has the S.H.I.E.L.D. crew hamstrung, and seemingly helpless, against Sarge, who may help them save the planet – but at a very significant cost. And the fact that this big bad villain, who has no problem threatening them at gunpoint and even shooting them, looks exactly like their former, heroic boss.
Cinemax, 10:00 p.m. ET
Jett has turned out to be a fun summer series – fast-moving, stylish, hard to predict, and fueled by some tasty performances, specifically Giancarlo Esposito and Gil Bellows as bad guys and, of course, Carla Gugino as this show’s resourceful, morally mysterious, sticky-fingered protagonist.