TNT, 1:00 p.m. ET
Professional golf has a long history and a long memory. Today marks the start of the 99th PGA Championship, held this year at the Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte, NC. It’s one of the four major championship events in pro golf – and over the many decades, only five players have managed to complete a grand slam by winning all four events. That fabled quintet is Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, and Tiger Woods. And over the next four days, Jordan Spieth, at age 24, has his first chance to wield his clubs to join that august club – and be the youngest player to achieve that very elusive and impressive feat.
TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET
A dozen Sidney Poitier movies are being shown by TCM today and tonight, including such crucially important Poitier films as 1958’s The Defiant Ones (at 10 p.m. ET) and 1967’s In the Heat of the Night (midnight ET). But to me – and apparently to TCM, which reserves the lead-off prime-time slot for another movie Poitier made in that busy year of 1967 – the highlight is To Sir, with Love, in which he stars as a substitute teacher challenged by a class of rowdy high-school students in London’s East End (the same lower-class, rough-and-tumble neighborhood mined for decades in England’s Eastenders soap opera). James Clavell, who published his novel Shogun a decade later, wrote the screenplay adaptation. It’s a sentimental film, ultimately, but also a very effective one, and includes memorable turns from the supporting cast, especially the young women around Poitier’s Mark Thackeray. Suzy Kendall plays the fellow young teacher offering moral support, and the initially resistant, ultimately respectful students include Jury Geeson and Lulu. Lulu gets to sing the movie’s title song, in the movie (it was a #1 hit for her that year) – in a scene that, when I was 13, made me want to be a teacher. Then came the movie All the President’s Men, when I was 22, and that film cemented my desire to become a journalist. In time, I became both. Thanks, Sir…
NBC, 9:00 p.m. ET
SERIES PREMIERE: Colin Jost and Michael Che host this summer edition of “Weekend Update,” a welcome, and extremely well-timed, August diversion from NBC and SNL. Nestled between Wednesday’s Full Frontal with Samantha Bee on TBS and Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, it’s the Thursday go-to TV show for stand-alone political humor.
MGM HD, 10:00 p.m. ET
This 1980 film is a very underrated Woody Allen movie. Largely, its cool reception may have been a matter of timing. Allen, after a strong of brilliantly breezy early comedies, had begun to deepen both his focus and his tone, and write and direct one ambitiously different movie after another, on a literally annual basis. Annie Hall, his masterpiece, came in 1977. Interiors, his Bergmanesque drama, followed in 1978. Manhattan, his black-and-white salute to New York, arrived in 1979. And then came 1980’s Stardust Memories, another black-and-white film, an introspective comedy so dark, and so introspectively honest, it made audiences at the time largely uncomfortable. It was a movie in which Allen played a popular director of movie comedies who didn’t want to make funny movies anymore, and wondered about life’s meaning – a cinematic subject building upon both Sullivan’s Travels and 8½. And parts of Stardust Memories, seen in that context, are dryly hilarious, as when Allen’s character, on a train filled with misfits and losers, looks through his window at a train on the opposite track, where all the passengers are glamorous and seem to be having such glorious fun. One of them (pictured) is Sharon Stone, making her very brief movie debut.
TBS, 10:30 p.m. ET
If you watched last week’s two-part debut of Greg Garcia’s
The Guest Book, you already get this show’s imaginatively unusual premise. It’s an anthology series with stand-alone stories and guest stars
and a continuing series with regular characters and an ongoing narrative. It’s a floor wax
and a dessert topping! And it works. Tonight’s third episode has, in its guest cabin, a couple sharing space with the husband’s boss and his much younger companion – but, at the same time, we learn more about the lives of the town stripper/blackmailer, her son, the local policewoman, and many other residents surrounding the rural cabin resort.
For an interview with series creator Garcia, see David Hinckley's All Along the Watchtower.
NBC, 11:35 p.m. ET
Tonight’s scheduled guests on The Tonight Show are comic Anthony Anderson, singer Kesha – and my boss, Terry Gross, leaving the radio booth at NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross to sit opposite Jimmy Fallon tonight on Tonight. Sing along with me, to the tune from West Side Story: “Tonight, Tonight won’t be just any night…”