1) Thanksgiving Day parade, 9 a.m. to noon, NBC and CBS (but on the West Coast, CBS will delay until about 1 p.m. PT. The mega-parade has 12 bands, lots of balloons and 28 floats, often with stars onboard. It will be Jimmy Fallon with the Roots, Mario Lopez with his family, Gloria Estefan with her daughter and granddaughter and Santa (shown here) wrapping things up. Near the start, NBC has the Broadway casts of “Funny Girl,” “The Lion King,” “A Beautiful Noise” and “Some Like It Hot”; CBS counters with the casts of “Moulin Rouge” and “Six.”
2) Pro football, all day. Just four days after moving their game from snowbound Buffalo to the enclosed stadium in Detroit, the Bills can stay there for another game. This time, they’re the opponents in the Lions’ annual Thanksgiving Day game. That’s 12:30 p.m. ET on CBS (which, on the West Coast, delays the parade until after the game). Then come two more games — Giants-Cowboys at 4:30 p.m. on Fox, Patriots-Vikings at 8:20 p.m. on NBC.
3) National Dog Show, noon, NBC, and more. NBC jumps from the parade to the dogs … then reruns the parade at 2 p.m. Meanwhile, three channels (Lifetime, Hallmark, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries) start a Christmas movie every two hours – 8 a.m., 10, noon, etc. And Turner Classic Movies has ‘40s family films, including Elizabeth Taylor in “Little Women” (10 a.m. ET), “National Velvet” (2:25 p.m.) and “Lassie Come Home” (4:30).
4) “A Waltons Thanksgiving,” 8-10 p.m., CW. This movie debuted Sunday and gets a quick rerun now. After last year’s reboot of the classic “A Walton’s Thanksgiving” (which will rerun Dec. 5), this again has Bellamy Young as the matriarch and Richard Thomas as narrator. Also at 8 are new Christmas movies – “My Southern Family Christmas” on Hallmark and “Baking All the Way” (with Yannick Bisson of “Murdoch Mysteries”) on Lifetime.
5) More. “Masked Singer” has moved to a Thursday for its semi-finals; three singers perform, with one being unmasked. CBS uses its 10 p.m. slot to launch its “Criminal Minds” reboot; a second episode is on Paramount+, with new ones there each Thursday. And it’s a day for great movies – “Godfather” (1972) and its sequel (1974) on AMC, 9:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., 6 and 10 p.m.; “North by Northwest” (1959) at 8 ET on Turner Classic Movies.