ABC, 8:00 p.m. ET
This is a warning, not a recommendation. Again. I warned about this ABC show last week, when it made its initial appearance, gobbling up three hours’ worth of the network’s prime time schedule – every Monday night minute of it – to present what purported to be “the best” from The Bachelor over its 24 editions since premiering in 2002. I joked, at the time, that three hours presenting the finest moments from The Bachelor would still require filling a gap of, oh, three hours of TV time. But imagine my surprise when I learned, after the fact, that The Bachelor: The Greatest Seasons – Ever was not a bloated, unwatchable three-hour one-shot special, but a 10-episode summer series. Thirty hours of ABC prime time in total. That’s not just bloated. That’s inhumane. ABC has seven decades of history from which to draw, and virtually anything, rerun or repackaged during the pandemic, would have been better than this.
The Movie Channel, 8:00 p.m. ET
Cameron Crowe wrote and directed this 2000 movie, a semi-autobiographical account of his days as one of the youngest writers ever to report for Rolling Stone magazine. It won him an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, but it’s gotten even more fun to watch over the years as its various cast members have enjoyed additional success of their own. Patrick Fugit, who plays Crowe’s cinematic stand-in William Miller, hasn’t done much since then, but oh my, so many others have. Frances McDormand, as William's mother, has been great ever since (and, as the star of 1996’s movie Fargo, was great before, as well). Zooey Deschanel plays William's rebellious and influential older sister, long before starring on Fox in New Girl. Jason Lee played a member of Stillwater, one of the bands William profiled in Almost Famous, before starring in NBC’s My Name Is Earl. Kate Hudson became a star thanks to her role as groupie Penny Lane here, and other memorable groupies are portrayed by Anna Paquin and Fairuza Balk. Billy Crudup plays Russell Hammond, the charismatic star of Stillwater – a character Crowe based on Glenn Frey of The Eagles, though Russell’s rooftop dive into the swimming pool was a move Crowe saw Duane Allman do on tour once. And in a small role, as Rolling Stones rock critic Lester Bangs, Philip Seymour Hoffman (pictured) steals the show. Clearly, I love this movie, and love its love of rock music most of all. The scene on the bus, when everyone starts singing alone to Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” captures everything you need to know about the joy of rock and roll.
PBS, 10:00 p.m. ET
This documentary is about a very different Marion the Librarian – not the sweet small-town Iowa “spinster” of The Music Man, but a wealthy woman of color who lived in the Barclay Hotel in Philadelphia’s chic Rittenhouse Square, was active in social causes, appeared on a local TV current-affairs and arts show, and loved the original Star Trek series because of what she perceived as its socialist utopian vision of the future. In late 1975, when Sony released the first Betamax consumer video recorder, she bought several, and began recording TV shows to keep a record of what it showed, and how it presented the news. Before long, and after switching eventually to VHS, she was recording 24 hours a day, a regimen she maintained from the start of the hostage crisis in Iran in 1979 (which gave birth, in time, to ABC’s Nightline, as well as to CNN) until her death in 2012. Over the decades, she amassed some 7,000 tapes – which was even more than I had collected, as a TV critic, when my house was hit by lightning and burned down in 1989. VHS tapes? Quite flammable. And Betamax tapes were $20 each when they first came out, while the recorders themselves retailed at somewhere around $1,700. So former librarian Marion Stokes was indeed a wealthy woman – and the treasure trove of recorded images she preserved is rich as well. As Recorder points out, you’d presume the local stations and networks would have preserved everything she recorded over the decades – but they didn’t. Check local listings.
