Wednesday
It’s the Fourth of July! If you’re in the United States, that means you might well have the day off, and now have an opportunity to celebrate the birth of our country by catching up on all the daytime television you normally miss out on!
FEATURED JUNKYARD PICK
Junkyard Wars (TLC, 8pm) has a special two-hour US vs. UK episode. The US winners compete against the UK winners and try to smash a Volkswagen Golf into as small a space as possible. Since it’s twice as long as a regular episode, it seems like they’ll have trouble rerunning it, so you might want to see it now. Both the British host (Robert “Kryten” Llewellyn) and American host (George Gray) will be on hand, as will Cathy Rogers. It shows again at 11pm, if you’re having trouble fitting in the prime-time airing.
The View (ABC, 10am) is a rerun from March. I just wanted to point out how weird it is that they list Ashley Judd as an “actress guest” but Wynonna as a “musical guest”. And then there’s poor Hugh Jackman, too.
Newsies (Fox, noon) is just the sort of movie that days off are for. If you didn’t have the day off, you’d never get around to watching an edited-for-television version of a musical about a newsboy revolt. And then you’d never see Christian Bale in the role that will haunt him the rest of his career, and you can’t allow that to happen, can you?
TNT is all about the bad movies I love so much today. Hairspray (TNT, 8am), back-to-back with Grease 2 (TNT, 10am)? Whee!
Twilight Zone marathon (Sci-Fi, 7am-1:30am) for many, many hours. There’s even a couple of the hour-long episodes, like “Printer’s Devil” (Sci-Fi, 3pm) and “Death Ship” (Sci-Fi, 11pm).
The Godfather (AMC, 11am) is, as you may have heard, a good movie. An even better movie is The Godfather, Part II (AMC, 2pm). Not as good a movie: The Godfather, Part III, which isn’t getting aired today. That’ll show ‘em.
The A-Team (TVLand, 1pm) may well be a fine episode. I can’t tell, because the episode description is “The A-Team is enlisted to restore law and order in a South American town.” For some reason, that sounds somehow familiar.
You Don’t Know Jack (730pm) is a television version of a computer game show, hosted by Paul Reubens in-character.
The Buffy the Vampire Slayer rerun (WB, 8pm) is “The Body”, in which Buffy finds the body of her dead mother. Some people have called this the finest hour of television broadcast in the last year.
If you don’t live in a town that has its own fireworks, you can watch Bon Jovi in the Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular (NBC, 8pm).
If Laurel can talk up Game 7 of the 1991 World Series, I feel fully justified in encouraging you to watch Game 5 of the 1984 NLCS (ESPN Classic, 8pm), in which the San Diego Padres completed an amazing comeback from being 0-2 in the best-of-five series to get to the first World Series in the franchise’s history. My favorite part of this series was the fact that the Cubs had last been in the Worlds Series 40 years previous. And there’s a guy holding up a sign near the end of this game saying “40 MORE YEARS”. Boy, that was satisfying. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that the Padres went on to get crushed by the Detroit Tigers in the World Series.
If you haven’t seen Cirque du Soleil live, you can see their Dralion show (Bravo, 7pm) on television. It’s cool.
My cable system just got the Food Network two weeks ago, and I already love Good Eats (Food, 8pm). So even though you may think that “A Rib for All Seasons” is a rerun, it’s new to me. And isn’t that what counts?
The Late Show With David Letterman (CBS, 10:35pm) is, again, a rerun. But it has Nathan Lane and a performance from “The Producers”!
The Tonight Show (NBC, 10:35pm) rerun has Prince!
South Park (Comedy Central, 11:30pm) is new, and has something to do with a mysterious magician. Can Jesus and Stan save the world?
