Long, cold Saturdays are heating up
Are Saturday nights where network shows go to die? NBC’s “Smash” makes the case for that assumption.
On the other hand, the competition for cable viewers seems to be heating up. AMC recently announced that when its ambitious Western “Hell on Wheels” returns in August, it wouldn’t air on Sunday nights, like the channel’s other original series do, but on Saturday nights.
AMC found that it already had a solid audience for Western movies on Saturday afternoons and evenings, and “Wheels” would appeal to that crowd.
Lifetime has also moved many ambitious, original projects to Saturday nights, including “Call Me Crazy” (8 p.m., TV-14), a star-studded ensemble piece with overlapping stories about families coping with mental illness. Jennifer Hudson, Octavia Spencer, Melissa Leo, Brittany Snow and Sarah Hyland star.
HBO has long used Saturday nights to showcase prestigious original films. Hilary Swank and Brenda Blethyn star in the 2013 drama “Mary and Martha” ( 8 p. m.) as mothers from different continents who lose their sons to malaria in Africa and turn their grief into a shared mission to eradicate a preventable disease.
While “Mary” is very much a movie about women embarking on a noble cause, it’s not afraid to reveal their shortcomings. Swank’s character in particular is hard to love for the first third of the film. But this makes the women’s transformations even more believable and their stories more powerful.
WATERGATE REVISITED
Too often, history — particularly recent history — is reduced to nostalgia and show business. So a week after “The ‘80s: The Decade That Made Us” premiered on the National Geographic Channel, I was hesitant about “All the President’s Men Revisited” ( 8 p. m. Sunday, Discovery, TV-14), hosted by Robert Redford.
The rewarding documentary just tries to tackle too much in its two- hour running time. I’m not sure if a weeklong or even a monthlong documentary miniseries could have done the subject justice.
“Men” covers the sprawling Watergate scandal that held Americans spellbound and dazed for more than two years. It looks at the two reporters ( Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein) who broke the story, dug into the scandal and kept it alive on the front pages of The Washington Post, as well as the 1976 movie “All the President’s Men,” which starred Redford and Dustin Hoffman, who played Woodward and Bernstein.
The Hollywood angle is the least substantial subject of the documentary, but arguably the only reason it got made in the first place. That being said, “Men” does a good job of reminding us of the scope of the Watergate scandal and the complexity of the man at its center, the politically savvy yet privately tortured President Richard Milhous Nixon, whose middle name lives on as a character on “The Simpsons.”
The film relies on the media coverage of the scandal and its investigation. Jon Stewart, one of the many talking heads interviewed, recalls the televised Senate hearings that ran during the afternoons for much of the summer of 1973 and the House impeachment hearings that dominated 1974. That they pre-empted soap operas, Stewart remembers, was a clear indication of their importance.
Nixon’s presidency and the subsequent Watergate scandal occurred before politics and media aligned into the rather neat and shallow ideological foxholes we know today. Some of Nixon’s Senate critics were liberal and moderate Republicans. Others were conservative Southern Democrats, most notably Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina, arguably the “star” of the Senate hearings. Nobody introduces Ervin or talks about his significance to viewers, nor does anyone outline the politics of the time and explain how Congress could take on a matter as consequential and distasteful as Watergate with so much collegiality and dignity.
Redford wasn’t the only celebrity with connections to Watergate. Columnist and actor Ben Stein (“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”) worked in the Nixon White House and can be seen here in archival footage crying at Nixon’s emotional farewell. Fred Thompson played a critical role as a counsel to the Watergate hearings in 1973, orchestrating the revelation of Nixon’s secret taping system. He later became a senator from Tennessee, briefly ran as a presidential candidate in 2008 and played the district attorney on “Law & Order.”