1) “NCIS: Sydney” season-finale, 9 and 10 p.m. CBS. It’s time for a final showdown with the conspiracy group known as The Collective. For Mackey (shown here), that goes back to her failed mission in Afghanistan. Now an FBI agent has been killed in Fiji and a deadly battle looms.
Read more…
1) “American Idol” season-finale, 8-11 p.m., ABC. The night will be stuffed with performers. They include Alicia Keys, Nelly, Tori Kelly, Brad Paisley, Jason Mraz, Motley Crue, Gin Blossoms, the three judges and former runner-up Clay Aiken. Then someone — Keyla Richardson, Hannah Harper or Jordan McCullough (shown here, right, last week with Elliott Yamin) — will become the 24th champion. Read more…
Dance will replace romance, as the Monday key to ABC’s summer line-up.
That’s “Dancing with the Stars: The Next Pro,” hosted by Robert Irwin (shown here). It debuts July 13, as part of line-up that also has three returning game shows and two specials.
For a while, ABC is dominated by the pro-basketball playoffs. This year, they start June 3 and could go as late on June 19.
Then summer has its delayed start — a three-hour annual country-music special is June 25, with other shows starting in July. Read more…
As it wraps its current season, the Fox network has news about future ones.
For this summer, it has a new game show, “Nation’s Dumbest.” For this fall, it has finally renewed “Murder in a Small Town” (shown here). And for a year later, it’s working on a new version of “Highway to Heaven.” Details include: Read more…
1) “Call the Midwife” finale, 8 p.m., PBS. For 15 years, this has given us good people in awful situations. Now that’s sort of ending; plans call for a feature film, a prequel series and (possibly in a couple years) some of these characters in a new setting. For now, there are deeply moving stories about the Rosalind/Cyril romance (shown here in a previous episode and Sister Monica Joan’s health. Read more…
1) “The Neighborhood” and “DMV” series finales, 8 and 8:30 p.m. today, CBS. This fall, CBS will trim from four comedies to two. “Neighborhood” has always known that this season (its eighth) would be its last, so it planned to go out with the weddings of the brothers, Malcolm and Marty. Then the clever “DMV” (shown here in its first episode) wraps its only season with some power shifts. Read more…
1) “The ’90s Boy Band Boom,” 8-10 p.m., CW. In the early ’90s, AJ McLean says here, record sales were all “grunge or rap.” He was in the Backstreet Boys (shown here), which sputtered at home, then spent two years abroad. It had wild stunts, loud clothes and sales of 130 million records. This fun film traces many of the groups that offered odd touches and bouncy music. Read more…
There was a time when cable-TV was more than a swap meet or a corporate shell game.
It was an adventure and it needed risk-takers. It needed people like Ted Turner, who died today (Wednesday, May 6) at 87.
Turner eventually merged his empire — CNN, TBS, TNT, TCM — into Warner Brothers, then regretted it. Warner has since been part of three more mega-deals..
Huge fortunes have been made by men whose names we’ll quickly forget. Turner will always be remembered.
I’ve written about him in my book-in-progress, “Television, and How It Got That Way.” Here are those portions: Read more…
For much of the year, the world sort of forgets about Broadway. Then comes a two-month surge.
In New York, that means a fresh world of dancing cats, rocking vampires and an entire village consumed by show tunes.
And for the rest of us. watching on TV sets? First, PBS delivers a four-Friday stretch of music, old (“Top Hat” is shown here) and fairly new. Then CBS has the Tony Awards. Read more…
1) “Suffs,” 9 p.m., PBS. For the next two Fridays, PBS gives us full-scale, Broadway-style musicals. Next week is the silly fun of “Top Hat,” but this one (shown here) is an involving look at the drive that brought women the vote in 1920. Shaina Taub won Tonys for her book and her music score; she also does a solid job as Alice Paul, an unrelenting American hero. Read more…
Best-bets for May 12: Season-finales for “NCIS” shows 
Best-bets for May 11: finales for “Idol” and more 
Best-bets for May 10: goodbye to “Midwife” & “Count” 
