Ken Burns, photographer: Cable Risdon

Best-bets for Oct. 16: Buffalo roam, humor returns

1) “The America Buffalo,” 8-10 p.m., PBS; rerunning at 10 and concluding Tuesday. This is classic Ken Burns (almost). It has deep insights, great visuals, painful details. Missing (until near the end) is optimism Burns (shown here) usually offers. We see the buffalo (and, separately, native Americans) pushed to the edge of extinction. Late in Tuesday’s finale, decency emerges. We’re left with some hope for the buffalo, the natives and the human soul. Read more…

1) “The America Buffalo,” 8-10 p.m., PBS; rerunning at 10 and concluding Tuesday. This is classic Ken Burns (almost). It has deep insights, great visuals, painful details. Missing (until near the end) is optimism Burns (shown here) usually offers. We see the buffalo (and, separately, native Americans) pushed to the edge of extinction. Late in Tuesday’s finale, decency emerges. We’re left with some hope for the buffalo, the natives and the human soul.

2) “The Daily Show” return, 11 p.m., Comedy Central. For almost a half-year, one of our sharpest comedy sources has been silent. Now it’s back, with guest hosts until the new one begins in 2024. You can add this to three shows (Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon) at 11:35, Seth Meyers at 12:37 and, on weekends, Bill Maher, John Oliver and “Saturday Night Live.” The laughs are back.

3) “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937), Disney+. Walt Disney was already thriving when he decided to make the first full-length, fully cel-animated movie. The result cost $1.5 million (tripling an early estimate), but it has made more than a billion dollars from various sources. Even its songs – “Heigh-Ho,” “Whistle While You Work,” “Someday My Prince Will Come” – were hits. Here’s a restored version, on the company’s 100th birthday.

4) “Once Upon a Studio,” cable. For its birthday, Disney revisits its 7-minute-cartoon days; in this short, all the cartoon characters try to gather for a group photo. That debuted Sunday on ABC and now reruns –11:51 a.m. on FXX; 8 p.m. on the Disney Channel (between “Frozen” at 6:15 and “Frozen II” at 8:10); and 8:30 on Freeform, between”Monsters, Inc.” at 6:25 and “Monsters University” at 8:37.

5) ALSO; At 8 and 9 p.m., CW has the season-opener of “FBoy Island,” with Katie Thurston (the former “Bachelorette” star) and two others trying to decide which guys are really there for romance. The first hour has several kisses and lots of schemes and bare torsos. At 10, NBC’s “Irrational” has its fourth episode … and its third to have great plotting and dialog. A kidnap tale takes some sharp turns.

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