Apple TV+, 3:00 a.m. ET
Last week, at the last minute, Oprah Winfrey and company swapped the content of their premiere installment in this new pandemic-era Winfrey talk show. Therefore, the show I wrote about last week actually is presented tonight, featuring How to Be an Antiracist author Ibram X. Kendi.
CBS All Access, 3:00 a.m. ET
SERIES PREMIERE: CBS All Access already has launched two Star Trek spinoff series as exclusives: Star Trek: Discovery and the more recent Star Trek: Picard, both of which are live-action dramas that are still running. Now comes a third new franchise entry, but Star Trek: Below Decks is different. It’s animated, not live action. And it’s a comedy, from Mike McMahan of Rick and Morty. The concept is to take the kind of stories that have propelled all previous Star Trek series and push them to the background. In the foreground: the lowly crew members in the lower decks, whose tasks include repairing the food replicators and doing follow-up work on planet exploration. It’s a clever idea, and this new series has fun with it, while sprinkling enough Star Trek Easter eggs to fill a genre TV basket. Not for very young viewers, because the language and action can be a bit rough – but worth watching for even the mildly curious.
Sundance Now, 3:00 a.m. ET
SERIES PREMIERE: Australian Tim Minchin is a stand-up comic, an actor, and a composer. As an actor, U,S. audiences might remember him as Atticus in Californication. As a composer, he wrote the music and lyrics for the Broadway musical version of Groundhog Day. And now, in this new series import, he’s the star and creator, and one of the writers and directors, of Upright, in which a directionless young man goes on an extensive Australian road trip, aiming to transport a family upright piano to his ailing mother. Milly Alcock plays the spirited young woman he picks up, grudgingly and not at all amorously, along the way – and it doesn’t take long at all before Upright establishes its own irrepressible, attractive quirkiness. Watch for the scene when Minchin, as Lucky Flynn, gets lucky when he’s about to be assaulted by a biker gang at a remote bar stop – and evades being pummeled by getting to the piano in the back of his truck, and joining one of the bikers in a lively duet on “Heart and Soul.”
TCM, 6:00 a.m. ET
Today’s subject on TCM’s “Summer Under the Stars” is Burt Lancaster, which makes today’s 24-hour film marathon especially rich. Pay special attention to 1964’s Seven Days in May at 3:15 p.m. ET, 1960’s Elmer Gantry at 8 p.m. ET, and 1962’s The Birdman of Alcatraz at 10:45 p.m. ET. And a few wonderful movies show up late, so set your recorders. There’s 1953’s From Here to Eternity at 1:30 a.m. ET, followed at 3:45 a.m. ET by 1980’s Atlantic City (pictured), in which he co-stars opposite the luminous Susan Sarandon, who in this film does more to popularize and immortalize citrus than Anita Bryant ever did.