Daily Best Bets
Best-bets for April 7: basketball vs. “Idol,” “Paradise” Best-bets for April 7: basketball vs. “Idol,” “Paradise” Best-bets for April 6: Americas and England’s Elton Best-bets for April 6: Americas and England’s Elton Best-bets for April 5: final-four time; also, Jack Black’s back Best-bets for April 5: final-four time; also, Jack Black’s back
Best-bets for April 7: basketball vs. “Idol,” “Paradise” Best-bets for April 7: basketball vs. “Idol,” “Paradise” Best-bets for April 6: Americas and England’s Elton Best-bets for April 6: Americas and England’s Elton Best-bets for April 5: final-four time; also, Jack Black’s back Best-bets for April 5: final-four time; also, Jack Black’s back
Stories

Easter week will be busy and Biblical

By Mike Hughes / April 5, 2025
1 of 3
Stories

Easter week will be busy and Biblical

TV is ready for its Easter surge.
That starts April 12, with Moses on the mountain top (shown here); it concludes eight days later with an Easter Day surge of movies, music and drama
Some of this is fueled by the era when audiences (and movie studios) savored Biblical epics. During the 1950s, four of the annual box-office champions were Biblical. Three of those – “Quo Vadis,” “The Ten Commandments” and “Ben-Hur” – also drew Oscar nominations for best picture … and will be shown this year. (The fourth was “The Robe.”) Read more…

By Mike Hughes / April 5, 2025
Daily Best Bets

Best-bets for April 7: basketball vs. “Idol,” “Paradise”

1) Basketball, 8:30 p.m. ET, CBS, with preview at 8. A no-upset tournament concludes. For the first time in 17 years, each team seeded No. 1 in a quadrant reached the final four. There’s no Cinderella team, no Butler or Bradley or Texas Tech or beyond. Instead, Duke, Florida, Auburn and Houston collided Saturday, with the winners tonight. Other networks will be quiet tonight — except for ABC, with “Idol” and (shown here) “Paradise.” Read more…

By Mike Hughes / April 5, 2025
Daily Best Bets

Best-bets for April 6: Americas and England’s Elton

1) “An Evening With Elton John and Brandi Carlile0” (shown here), 8 p.m. CBS. After hearing John’s music, Carlile taught herself to play the piano. Now the two have shared an Oscar nomination (for the song “Never Too Late”) and an album. In this hour, at London’s Palladium Theatre, they do songs from the album, plus his hits; they also pause for a conversation. Read more…

By Mike Hughes / April 4, 2025
Weekly Previews

Week’s top-10 for April 7: Basketball ends; “Last of Us” returns

1) Basketball, 8:30 p.m. ET today, CBS. A no-upset year concludes. For the first time in 17 years (and, reportedly, the second in tourney history), each team seeded No. 1 in a quadrant reached the final four. There’s no Cinderella team, no Butler or Bradley or Texas Tech. Instead, Florida, Duke (shown here), Auburn and Houston collided Saturday, with the winners tonight. Read more…

By Mike Hughes / April 3, 2025
Stories

A smart Smart shows finds new crises

Amid the swirling complications of “Hacks,” there’s a familiar theme.
“Be careful what you wish for,” Jean Smart said.
In the fourth season (starting Thursday, April 10, on Max), Deborah Vance (Smart) has her wish – a latenight talk show. It’s he dream of many comedians, except ….
Joan Rivers – the real-life person sometimes compared to the fictional Deborah – did get her own talk show. It failed and her life sagged.
That might not happen on “Hacks,” but things won’t be easy. “It’s the pressure,” Smart said. It “gets to her.”
Read more…

By Mike Hughes / April 3, 2025
Stories

Pax made a grand, failed bid to be No. 7

(This is the latest chapter in the book-in-progress, “Television, and How It Got That Way.” The full book, so far, is in “News and Quick Comments”; there, this is Chapter 11, concluding a section on the search for a fourth network and beyond.)

If someone had held a gathering of TV moguls (not a good idea), we would have noticed Bud Paxson instantly.
He stood 6-foot-7. He had a downhome manner and was fond of carnival barkers. And he skipped any of the TV-executive notions of surveys and screenings and such.
He simply leapt ahead. Taking the zillions he’d made from home-shopping, he bought TV stations, bought reruns, had some new shows (include “Sue Thomas, F.B. Eye,” shown here) and created an entire network in his name.
Well, half his name. This was “Pax Net”; it persisted for seven years. Read more…

By Mike Hughes / April 2, 2025
Daily Best Bets

Best-bets for April 4: 50 years of rowdy-good music

1) “Austin City Limits Celebrates 50 Years,” 9-11 p.m., PBS. Willie Nelson did the first show on Oct. 17, 1974, then returned (at 91) 50 years later. We get clips of both, plus new music, ranging from country (Chris Stapleton) to bluegrass (Billy Strings), blues (Gary Clark Jr., shown here in a previous concert, with a rousing finale) and more, including Rufus Wainwright’s soaring “Hallelujah.” Read more…

By Mike Hughes / April 2, 2025
Stories

Time for love, laughs, friendship and orgasms

.At an acting class, two opposites collided.
Molly Kochan “was kind of a wallflower,” said Nikki Boyer, who wasn’t.
“She had long, brown hair. We were in an acting class and she couldn’t stand me…. She was very quiet and to herself and she didn’t like my energy.”
Naturally, one of the great friendships was forming. It survived through Molly’s stage-four cancer diagnosis, through her end-of-life sexual odyssey and through their podcast, “Dying For Sex.”
Now that’s been turned into a mini-series (shown here) that arrives in one lump (eight half-hours) on Friday, April 4. Many people will find it compelling, especially with the riveting work of Michelle Williams as the late Molly and Jenny Slate as Nikki. Some will find it off-putting, because of its sexual kinkiness. Read more…

By Mike Hughes / April 2, 2025
Stories

PBS music? It’s funky, country, classical and beyond

It’s time to catch PBS’ favorite kind of music. Which, of course, is classical.
Or maybe it’s funk (shown here with James Brown) Or country or Latin. Or blues or ballads or bluegrass or Broadway.
All of that shows up soon on PBS, which is also the birthplace of “Rubber Ducky” and “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”
There are times (usually federal-budget times) when people peg PBS into one category. In truth, it strains to be everything – from kids to antique, from dramas to nature. And it’s music tastes reflect those extremes.
There have been two film biographies — on radiant cellist Jacqueline du Pre (March 28) and Broadway’s Liza Minnelli (April 1). Coming up: A wide-ranging “Austin City Limits” special (April 4), “We Want the Funk” (April 8), Chopin (April 11) and more, including jazz and Broadway musicals. Let’s look at some upcoming ones: Read more…

By Mike Hughes / April 1, 2025
Stories

Easter week will be busy and Biblical

By Mike Hughes / April 5, 2025
Daily Best Bets

Best-bets for April 7: basketball vs. “Idol,” “Paradise”

By Mike Hughes / April 5, 2025
Daily Best Bets

Best-bets for April 6: Americas and England’s Elton

By Mike Hughes / April 4, 2025
Weekly Previews

Week’s top-10 for April 7: Basketball ends; “Last of Us” returns

By Mike Hughes / April 3, 2025
Stories

A smart Smart shows finds new crises

By Mike Hughes / April 3, 2025