Dolly’s latest Christmas treat is a doozy
It’s only the weekend before Thanksgiving, but we may already have arrived at the Christmas special of 2020. I’m not saying “Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square” is good, but you won’t soon forget it.
Streaming Sunday on Netflix, “Square” offers a full-blown musical with extensive choreography by director Debbie Allen.
The story, if you can call it that, takes place in Fullerville, a little town that looks like it came out of a Thomas Kinkaid painting. Christine Baranski plays Regina Fuller, an embittered former resident out to sell the town to shopping center developers (Cheetah Mall) and evict everyone on Christmas Eve, no less.
Parton plays a wraithlike homeless woman as well as an angel. Treat Williams is Regina’s former love interest and owner of a hardware store-turned-secondhand outlet that looks suspiciously like a Cracker
Barrel gift shop. He’s the keeper of the town’s memories and tells us about it in a song!
Much of the dialogue is sung, and the musical numbers propel the story. And like the story, the lyrics sound like they were made up on the spot. The stories and songs involve a handsome pastor (Josh Segarra) and his cheerful wife (Mary Lane Haskell) and their fertility issues, a feisty hairdresser (Jenifer Lewis), a possible brain cancer diagnosis, a foundling child and a digressive homage to “The Wizard of Oz” (8 p.m. and 10:15 p.m. Sunday, TBS, TV-G).
No one can call Dolly Parton stingy, and “Christmas on the Square” comes overstuffed in every conceivable fashion.
› Some of the best books are best read. Some of the most powerful writing resists translation to the screen. Directors have been making adaptations of “The Great Gatsby” since the silent era, and none capture its poetry. Words that move, particularly on a personal and intimate level, don’t make for memorable “moving pictures.”
Further proof of this phenomenon arrives with “Between the World and Me” (8 p.m. Saturday,
HBO, TV-14). Published to great acclaim in 2015, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book unfolds as a long letter to his 15-year-old son, an epistemological version of “the talk” that Black parents often have with their children, teaching them the facts of life in a society that does not seem to value Black people.
Coates relates his own story of growing up in Baltimore and puts that time and the present into the context of American history, a story, Coates contends, that is shot through with presumptions of white supremacy.
This production offers a chorus of voices reading passages, including the author and Angela Bassett, Angela Davis, Joe Morton, Wendell Pierce, Phylicia Rashad, Courtney B. Vance, Oprah Winfrey and many more.
There is a great deal of difference between the act of reading one man’s letter in his own voice and listening to it recited
by a group. One offers a powerful communion between reader and writer, the other is a pious performance piece delivered by movie stars.
› “Belushi” (9 p.m. Sunday, Showtime, TV-MA) is director R.J. Cutler’s documentary take on the larger-thanlife comedian who rocketed to fame on “Saturday Night Live” and was enjoying a successful movie career when he died of a drug overdose in 1982.
Filled with reminiscences from the living (Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd) and the dead (Gilda Radner, Penny Marshall and Harold Ramis), “Belushi” fills in the blanks of its subject’s biography with extensive use of animation, offering a two-dimensional look at a child Belushi at home with his doting grandmother and other moments for which footage cannot be found.