1) The Ten Commandments” (1956), 7-11:44 p.m., ABC. It’s the annual showing of an epic (shown here) that won an Oscar for special effects and was nominated for six more, including best picture. The next morning (10:30 a.m. ET), it moves to UPtv and starts a Palm Sunday marathon. Read more…
TV is ready for its Easter splurge.
That started April 12, with Moses on the mountain top; it concludes eight days later with an Easter Day surge of movies, music (including Handel’s “Messiah”) and more. In between, it has dramas (shown here is “The Chosen”) and even a stage musical.
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. All of them will be rerun this year — “Quo Vadis,” “The Ten Commandments” and “Ben-Hur” (each an Oscar-nominee for best picture) plus “The Robe.”) Read more…
1) “Now Hear This” season-opener, 9 p.m., PBS. Tony Bennett didn’t really leave his heart in San Francisco, but Frederic Chopin literally left his in Warsaw. (After his death, his sister smuggled it back to a cathedral.) That’s one of many stories about a man who loved his homeland, but was away from it for half his lifetime. Host Scott Yee visits elegant settings in Poland and Paris (shown here), hearing great music. Read more…
Wise souls knew Kaitlyn Dever would be in “The Last of Us.”
They just didn’t know when it would be or whom she would play.
As a teen, Dever did a script-reading for a “Last of Us” movie. She would star as Ellie, the young survivor of a global apocalypse.
That project faded, then returned as one of the most expensive shows in TV history. And its second season (starting 9 p.m. Sunday, April 13, on HBO) has Dever, now 28, as Abby, a skilled and vengeful soldier.
“To have it come back around, like 10-plus years later, felt surreal,” she said. Read more…
1) “Matlock,” 9 p.m., CBS. Last week ended with a jolt: Olympia learned Matty has been lying to her. Now she demands the truth; that brings a tense hour, reminding us that Kathy Bates (shown here) is a gifted, Oscar-winning actress. Can Matty salvage the friendship? Can she find who buried the vital study? That will be settled (partly) in next week’s season-finale. Read more…
The Acorn streamer – specializing in British-type mysteries – has a busy stretch of shows and news.
For now, it has three movie-length episodes of “The Chelsea Detective” (shown here in a previous season). After that are six episodes of the long-running “Brokenwood Mysteries.”
And further away? Acorn has signed Brooke Shields for a series that – in a break from Acorn tradition –will be set in the U.S. Read more…
1) “Good Cop/Bad Cop” season-finale, 9 p.m., CW. This first season has been way too short (eight episodes), but sharp and fun. Far from her role as Blair Waldorf in “Gossip Girl,” Leighton Meester plays a savvy cop, working with her smart-but-loopy brother (Luke Cook, shown here with Meester) for their dad, the police chief. Now an old case could rip the small town apart. Read more…
(This is the 14th chapter of the book-in-progress, “Television, and How It Got That Way.” To read at all (so far) in order, click “News and Quick Comments” and scroll to the headline that starts, “The Book.”)
At times, TV people decide that situation comedies are doomed. One such time came seven years before “Seinfeld” (shown here) would start a comedy comeback.
In the 1984-85 season, “Dallas” and “Dynasty” were at the top; two more soaps (“Knots Landing” and “Falcon Crest”) were in the top 10. Viewers watched light action (“A-Team,” “Magnum,” “Riptide”), but not comedies: Read more…
1) “We Want the Funk,” 9-10:30 p.m., PBS. “Music was our freedom,” Questlove says in this vibrant documentary. And most free of all was the funk sound. Rippling with great clips, this spans generations. It focuses heavily on James Brown, but also has music masters (from George Clinton, shown here, to Kirk Franklin) still around to vividly tell their story. Read more…
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…
