MONDAY, JUNE 2
Monday evening begins promisingly enough with a tribute to recently departed cinema god Sydney Pollack; Turner Classic Movies is spooling four of his films tonight. The Slender Thread airs at 8 p.m., starring Anne Bancroft and Sidney Poitier and a suicide hotline–for real! Then every two hours another one: Three Days of the Condor, Tootsie, and Jeremiah Johnston.
If you only tune in for Tootsie, you’ll be done in time to catch the premiere episode of Legally Blonde: The Musical: The Search for Elle Woods, in which contestants vie to play Reese Witherspoon’s secretly-smart ditz lawyer on Broadway. On MTV, of course.
TUESDAY, JUNE 3
Montana and South Dakota head to the polls today to determine just how wearying the electoral endgame between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton can become. Also fascinating will be to see how political pundits and cable-news "anchors" try to spin the results of these primaries into something important. Flip around the cable news channels and see for yourself, but don’t expect results early in the evening, and don’t sit up for them. When you have had enough of Chris Matthews, turn to Fox at 9 p.m. for Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen. Like all such series, it’s getting close to the end so it’s a little more interesting to watch. Who will become executive chef of London West Hollywood? It’s a bit like asking who will be the Democratic nominee …
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 4
At 9 p.m. tonight, two conflicting views of America: one was aired in the Middle East last year to show the locals that life in America does not feel like the life of the Stormtroopers on the Death Star but rather more like the Ewoks of Endor, if they had had mayoral elections and had some Middle Eastern volunteers. Whatever. The much truer picture of life in America, of course, is not here on the Sundance channel but on the CW. We’re looking forward to the day when Farmer Wants a Wife unspools in Jordan: to help him pick his wife he has them all bake pies, which are then judged at the county fair by a group of stirrup-panted denim-shirted farmwives.
THURSDAY, JUNE 5
It’s the second part of the two-part season finale of Bravo’s Step it Up and Dance. If you suspect, as we do, that somehow Project Runway won’t be as much fun once it moves to Lifetime, maybe it’s worth trying to relive some of the excitement by watching and pretending you’ve been doing it all season; we find it dificult to take Elizabeth Berkley too seriously in this role, and are disappointed she’s never walked up to the dancers to ice their nipples for a performance. Nomi Malone, now she was a star! CBS has the cheek to air a series premiere tonight at 10 p.m. Swingtown is a Mike Kelley number, and this pilot was directed by HBO staple Alan Poul. From the network’s description: "It portrays the ever-shifting “swing” of the pendulum that reflected the change in America’s collective value system — morally, politically and socially." Hmm … that sounds like code for plain old swinging! Wait, it’s not code at all: "After moving to an upscale lakeside Chicago suburb in July of 1976, Susan and Bruce Miller must confront temptation in the form of their provocative new neighbors, Tom and Trina Decker, while not abandoning their old friends Janet and Roger Thompson." Yuck.
FRIDAY, JUNE 6
Just go out and get hammered tonight. There’s nothing on.
Follow Tom McGeveran via RSS.
