Father's Day Choices: Remembering Old Broadway, Old TV, and Old TV Dads

Father's Day is Sunday, and this year, it seems, it's a day to wallow in nostalgia, on or about TV. Sunday night offers competing prime-time awards shows: The Tony Awards on CBS, featuring an amazing competition among Broadway musical revivals, and the TV Land Awards, a nonstop stroll down TV's memory lane.

Plus, TV WORTH WATCHING's own Diane Werts has assembled a dizzyingly diverse list of DVD sets featuring famous and infamous TV dads. (Read it here.) Put them all together, they spell F-A-T-H-E-R...

Of the two Sunday shows, I'd choose the Tonys (8 p.m. ET). Much as I love vintage TV, and as much as I chuckle at the idea of a taped piece featuring Laverne & Shirley, a.k.a. Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams, getting accosted by photographers as though they were Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, the TV Land Awards (9 p.m. ET) is the sort of show that's better to watch on one of the endless instances when TV Land reruns it. That way, you can zip through the boring parts -- and the interminable commercial breaks.

The Tonys, over on CBS, are a one-shot deal. And this year, you'll get a shot to see and hear some of the best musical revivals mounted not just this year, but in recent memory. Kelli O'Hara in South Pacific, Patti LuPone in Gypsy, the imaginative reworking of Sunday in the Park with George -- terrific, terrific, terrific. And this telecast will give you a free taste of all three, and also of such thoroughly modern musicals as Passing Strange and In the Heights. And, of course, the non-musical plays.

The lineup is so strong, it ought to make for a very memorable show. I'm rooting for O'Hara -- and, by the way, I recorded an interview with her recently for Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and it's scheduled to run Monday. I'll be hosting that day, and also talking to Jenji Kohan, creator of Showtime's Weeds, which returns for a new season that night. So please tune in.

And please check out Diane's Father's Day overview, also, and add her blog -- which you can find beneath the daily BEST BETS, or by clicking Diane Werts in the navigation bar -- to your daily reading habit. Oh, and speaking of the navigation bar -- we've added a Best Bets button there as well. So if you want to read the daily BEST BETS in a larger, easier-to-read format, click on that button, too.

Oh, and all you dads out there: Happy Father's Day. If my now-grown kids are reading this, don't you forget it. Or me...