There are plenty of people, it seems, with no great stake in the Super Bowl.
For various reasons – sanity or sobriety or sheer orneriness – they don’t carer whether it’s a Chief or a 49er who dumps Gatorade on his coach.
They want TV on Sunday … which isn’t easy. With the game on Fox, the other commercial broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, even CW) are all ducking into reruns. So are Showtime and Starz.
Still, that leaves some solid alternatives; on Sunday, your choices include:
PBS
These people are refreshingly unaware of pop culture. They have a full line-up of new shows:
– The finale of “Howards End,” at 8 p.m. A richly crafted four-parter starring Hayley Atwell and Matthew Macfadyen, it’s already been on Starz.
– The terrific “Sanditon”(shown here) at 9. In the fifth of eight parts, we see the angry divide between Tom and his unpaid workers.
– “Vienna Blood” at 10. It’s the start of a two-part mystery.
HBO
While the other pay-extra networks pause, HBO booms ahead with:
– “The Outsider,” at 9. In this Stephen King tale, Jason Bateman seems to be a nice guy (as usual) and, inexplicably, a brutal killer.
– “Avenue 5” at 10, with Hugh Laurie in an offbeat comedy from the “Veep” creator.
– “Curb Your Enthusiasm at 10:30.
“Roots” and “On the Basis of Sex”
Here are two towering stories of bias in America:
– “Roots,” the all-time classic, is 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. on Sundancer.
– “On the Basis of Sex,” with Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s early courtroom triumphs, is 9 p.m. on Showtime.
Trilogies
– The bright and likable “Descendants” musicals are at 4, 6 and 8 p.m. on the Disney Channel.
– And the delightful “Back to the Future” is 5:30 p.m. on Freeform, with its sequels at 8:10and 10:50.
And beyond
This is sort of why all those streaming channels are there. “Picard” just started on CBS All-Access … “The Crown” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” are waiting on Netflix and Amazon … Disney+ and AppleTV+ are loaded … and there’s Acorn and Britbox and more. Forget football and have fun.