Lifetime serves up cheesy ‘Salt-N-Pepa’
With all of the changes to movies and television, the TV musical biopic has proven to be one of the more resilient genres. They have arrived in varying degrees of “quality,” but the cheesier movies tend to be more memorable. For many years, network biopics like “Little Richard” (2000) and “The Temptations” (1998) were staples of sweeps week. For a brief moment, musical biopics were considered prestige motion pictures. Both “Ray” (2004) and “Walk the Line” (2005) earned Oscars. Both were brilliantly sent up in the 2007 spoof, “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.”
For the past decade or so, Lifetime has been busy churning out biographies like “CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story” (2013), “Ring of Fire” (2013), “Toni Braxton: Unbreak My Heart” (2016), “Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B” (2014), “Whitney” (2015) and “Britney Ever After” (2017). In many ways, these musical waxworks are interchangeable with their takes on other aspects of pop culture, like “Liz & Dick,” “A Tale of Two Coreys,” “William & Kate: The Movie” and “The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story.”
If you like this particular brand of cheeseball, then feast on “Salt-N-Pepa” (8 p.m. Saturday, Lifetime, TV-14), about friends who graduate from Queensborough Community College to pop stardom after recording a song for a friend.
› BBC America launches a new documentary miniseries, “A Wild Year on Earth” (8 p.m., Saturday), offering gorgeous photography of the multitudinous wonder of animals and fish, flora and fauna, as they are affected by the changing seasons. The notion of applying a calendar to the unfolding spectacle is but the latest “hook” for the nature biography. These series have explored wildlife continent by continent, examined life on sea, land and air, and now refocus on Earth’s diversity through the prism of the datebook.
As years do, it begins in January, as the tilt of the Earth sends environments in the Northern Hemisphere into deep freeze and brings summer to the south. We begin in Antarctica, among the world’s most forbidding landscapes, yet home to one of its largest and most resilient mammals, the polar bear. Over the course of its six-episode “Year,” the series will examine the gentle kiss of spring’s cherry blossoms, the violence of America’s tornado season, migrations inspired by melting ice, the desperation of African herds driven by drought season, and the hints of returning winter that tell millions of monarch butterflies to get their bags packed for points south.
As always, “Year” is gorgeous in ways that make it critic-proof. My quibble with the series is its title and concept. While it claims to describe nature in a “wild” state, it also applies the notion of a 12-month “year,” a concept that is entirely man-made, and, in the natural scheme of things, a relatively recent human construct. Not to sound like a child (or perhaps a stoner), polar bears don’t know it’s January. They only know it’s cold.
“Year” is the latest series to tap into “Downton Abbey” nostalgia. Laura Carmichael lends her voice to the narration. She’s better known as Lady Edith from that series. Kevin Doyle appears on “Miss Scarlet and the Duke” on “Masterpiece” (8 p.m. Sunday, PBS, TV-PG, check local listings). He appeared on “Downton” as the valet-turned-footman Molesley. Samantha Bond, who played the meddling Lady Rosamund, narrates “Agatha Christie’s England” (10 p.m. Sunday, PBS, TV-14, check local listings), the second of two PBS documentaries about the mystery writer, whose many books are outsold by only Shakespeare’s plays and the Bible.
› A creation of Edward Burns (“Public Morals”), “Bridge and Tunnel”) (9 p.m. Sunday, Epix, TV-MA) explores the culture clash of young people from a working-class Long Island community who move to Manhattan to follow their artistic dreams.