BEST BETS FOR DECEMBER 14, 2007

	EXTRAS HBO2, 7 p.m. ET Sunday night, HBO presents the special telemovie-length finale to Extras, the Ricky Gervais-Stephen Merchant follow-up to their brilliant British series The Office. If you haven't seen Extras yet, there's still time to catch up. HBO's sister channel, HBO2, is showing all 12 episodes of Extras tonight in a mirthful six-hour marathon. One absolute highlight: David Bowie "serenading" Gervais' poor Andy Millman with a devastating impromptu insult song. For more on Extras, read today's BIANCULLI'S BLOG.
	IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE NBC, 8 p.m. ET Not too many years ago, boys and girls, this movie was everywhere on TV in December, because, due to sloppy guardianship, it had fallen into the public domain. That meant every network, cable channel or local station that owned a copy could televise it for free, with every penny of commercial revenue being pure profit. That situation was corrected, and now NBC owns exclusive broadcast rights to this 1946 classic, and shows it twice a year each Christmas season. James Stewart makes the whole Frank Capra movie work beautifully, but NBC's interstitial interruptions don't exactly help the flow of the drama.
	THE PASSENGER Sundance Channel, 8 p.m. ET Sundance Channel is devoting its prime time tonight to a mini-marathon of films by Michelangelo Antonioni - and right in the middle is this rarely televised 1975 movie starring Jack Nicholson. He plays a reporter who adopts the identity of a dead gun runner, and embarks upon several intense new experiences. Among the most intense: a young woman played by Maria Schneider. Three years before, she had starred opposite another big American star, Marlon Brando, in a butter-rich little movie called Last Tango in Paris.
	TO CATCH A THIEF TCM, 8 p.m. ET Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant, Grace Kelly. Any one of those is a good bet for an entertaining movie. Any two of them, working together, guarantees it - Hitchcock and Grant in Notorious and North by Northwest, Hitchcock and Kelly in Rear Window. And all three together, as they are in this 1955 stylish romantic adventure film - well, what's not to enjoy?
	MEN IN TREES ABC, 8 p.m. ET Jack is still missing - floating on a lifeboat with another woman in the Bering Sea - but Marin has other problems, and men issues, closer to home. Cash returned unexpectedly last week, and tonight Marin learns why.
	THE GODFATHER Bravo, 9 p.m. ET On a slow TV night, Bravo makes you an offer you can't refuse. Brando made this movie, playing the puffy but powerful Don Corleone, in 1972 - the same year he pushed cinematic mainstream sex scenes to new levels in the aforementioned Last Tango in Paris. Doing those two roles, and those two movies, in the same year, that's almost unimaginable. Yet Brando did it, masterfully.