The All-Star Dog Rescue Celebration
For the second consecutive year, two-time Academy Award-winner and animal advocate Hilary Swank produces a holiday-evening event for a cause dear to her, supporting and encouraging the adoption of rescue dogs. Many other celebrities who are also canine lovers participate in the two-hour special, which led to more than 4,500 adoption applications after its original edition aired. (Fox)
THE NATURE OF THINGS
Tonight’s new episode looks at one of the hottest and most debated topics in conservation and environmentalism today — rewilding. The documentary Manufacturing the Wild considers the concept of not just preserving wildlife but going back thousands of years and re-creating new wildlife and new wilderness. The doc was written and directed by Roberto Verdecchia, who has covered topics from the arms trade to high-energy particle physics. His film on how the Andes might save the world won a best doc at this year’s Banff Media Festival. (CBC)
MOVIE: RECIPE FOR A PERFECT CHRISTMAS
A food critic makes a deal with a handsome chef: if he’ll keep her estranged mom out of her hair, she’ll review his restaurant. An attack of writer’s block brings her to the realization that she has more than a professional interest in him. Carly Pope, Christine Baranski and Bobby Cannavale star. (Showcase)
THE MUPPETS
Ed Helms (The Office, The Hangover) guest stars as himself, and inspires a Muppet karaoke session to end them all at the tavern run by Rowlf, in Pig Out. The problem comes the next day, when no one is at work — to the extreme chagrin of Kermit. The show must go on, though, and Fozzie has a mishap during it. (ABC)
CHRISTMAS THROUGH THE DECADES
If you want to look back at what Christmas was like in “the good old days” tune in to tonight’s new episode devoted to the ’60s. Christmas was marred for many people by the killing of JFK in 1963, and later in the decade Robert Kennedy, as well as the continuing loss of life in Vietnam. A Christmas Eve broadcast from the Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968 wished peace and hope to all on Earth. (History)
FIRSTHAND
Stories about those in true conflict with their birth-assigned gender are told through the voices of those individuals in the new episode Transforming Gender. The film opens up a world in which transgender people have painfully limited security, making them among the most persecuted and least protected people in North American society. (CBC)
ELEMENTARY
In tonight’s new episode, All My Exes Live in Essex, Holmes and Watson (Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu) investigate the murder of a fertility lab technician and discover that the woman had a secret personal life which leads them to multiple suspects. (CBS, Global)