For Better or Werts : TV Worth Watching

FLICK PICKS: Gender-benders

He or she or -- ? Gender-benders fill Tuesday night on Turner Classic Movies with masquerades, impersonations and serious/silly sexual confusion.

Kicking off the quartet at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday is Yentl, Barbra Streisand's 1983 tale of a woman going guy to study the Torah. Then it's Julie Andrews singing from both sides as Victor/Victoria (10:30 p.m. ET), Blake Edwards' 1982 gem costarring James Garner and Robert Preston at their best.

Two flat-out comedies round out the night: Billy Wilder's 1959 delight Some Like It Hot (1 a.m. ET; photo above), with Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon (and one of cinema's best-ever final lines); and Sydney Pollack's 1982 Tootsie (3:15 a.m. ET), where Dustin Hoffman plays a soap opera "actress" alongside Jessica Lange and Teri Garr.

Stay tuned for some real-life and reel life confusion this weekend when cable runs a first-season marathon of ABC's soon-to-return Dirty Sexy Money (Saturday 9 a.m.-7 p.m. ET on SOAPnet). The big-money melodrama includes transgender actress Candis Cayne as the mistress of William Baldwin's would-be U.S. senator (photo at right), only one of the wacky, wealthy Darling family members who form the nighttime soap's center. Peter Krause, Donald Sutherland and Blair Underwood help get the juicy action going, setting the stage for Lucy Liu to join the fun when ABC debuts the second season Wednesday, Oct. 1 at 10 p.m. ET.

1 Comments

Ellery said:

Hey, David - heard you, and mention of your website, on NPR today when you talked about Friday Night Lights return to the tube. Great site! I'm enjoying your blog and finding lots of uesful info. I do want to disagree with you about Dirty Sexy Money, though, where you say on your homepage that the show is in need of major improvement. I thoroughly enjoy the show and was very happy to learn it would be returning this fall. I do agree, though, that Lucy Liu is a reason to give the show "another try" for those who haven't been hooked yet. Thanks for a great site!

October 1, 2008 6:27 PM

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Diane Werts has been glued to the tube since she can remember, growing up in a household where the TV came on first thing in the morning and stayed on till bedtime and beyond. She worked for the USA Film Festival, then for The Dallas Morning News writing about everything from Shakespeare to macrame art to rock music (and has the hearing loss to prove it). She moved to New York's Newsday to edit their glossy TV magazine, then returned to writing about television, specializing in its stranger permutations. She's a past president of the Television Critics Association.

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