SATURDAY’S BEST PICKS
6PM $ College Basketball With March Madness just days away, college hoops fans can entertain themselves with hours upon hours of conference championship action today, starting with this title game in the Mountain West Tournament. Then later on, there are finals in the Big 12 and ACC on ESPN, the Big East and Pac-12 on Fox, and the MAC, Southland and Big West on ESPN2.
6PM (HGTV) Build It Forward Home renovator Matt Blashaw and designer Taniya Nayak team up to reward local heroes across the United States for their selfless acts on behalf of their communities in this upbeat and heartfelt new series. In each of the five episodes, the pair travel to a different city to deliver a surprise, lifeenhancing renovation to the home and community project of a local hero. The season’s itinerary includes makeovers in Albuquerque, N.M., Oakland, Calif., Austin, Texas, Syracuse, N.Y. and Cosby, Tenn.
8PM (HALL) MOVIE Feeling Butterflies This new springtime romantic drama definitely earns points for its quirky premise, which is both original and seasonally appropriate. Kayla Wallace stars as Emily, who has launched a new service that provides live monarch butterflies to release at special events. At one such birthday party, she meets Garrett (Kevin McGarry, “When Calls the Heart”), a handsome single dad who sets Emily’s heart aflutter. He and his young daughter also help Emily’s new business spread its wings. Alyssa Gervasi and Ishan Morris co-star.
8PM (HGTV) Mash-Up Our Home The married design team of Kele Dobrinski and Christina Valencia have an uncanny knack for providing “aesthetic mediation” for couples who are struggling with drastically different design preferences. Each episode finds the duo coming up with a harmonious mash-up of the styles that results in a dream home catering to both unique tastes. In the premiere, Dobrinski and Valencia help a couple torn between neutral minimalism and vibrant colors, devising a mash-up that makes both parties fall back in love with their home.
8PM (LIFE) MOVIE Cruel Instruction After16-year-old Kayla Adams gets expelled, a school counselor advises her mother, Karen, to send the unruly teen to a youth residential treatment center. Karen does just that, unaware that the Utah facility is a hellhole where the inmates are subjected to draconian behavioral modification methods meted out by the authoritarian headmistress, Miss Connie. Camryn
Manheim, Cynthia Bailey, Kelcey Maweme and Morgan Taylor Campbell star in this 2022 melodrama, which is inspired by actual events.
8PM (HBO) MOVIE West Side Story Steven Spielberg raised eyebrows when he announced his new film adaptation of this classic 1957 Broadway musical, which won 10 Academy Awards for its 1961 screen version. Skeptics were (mostly) silenced upon the release of Spielberg’s 2021 do-over, though, which went on to score seven Oscar nods in its own right, including one for supporting actress Ariana DeBose, reprising a role that earned an Oscar for Rita Moreno in the first film. Rachel Zegler and Ansel Elgort are starcrossed lovers Tony and Maria; Mike Faist and David Alvarez co-star. 9PM(CNN) MOVIE Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain This new feature-length documentary from Oscar winner Morgan Neville (“Twenty Feet From Stardom”) offers an affectionate remembrance of cultural explorer, writer and chef Anthony Bourdain, who died in 2018. Bourdain burst onto the scene with his wildly successful 2000 memoir “Kitchen Confidential,” which vividly captured his experiences in the restaurant trade. From there, he swiftly transformed from gifted line chef to globe-trotting explorer and beloved TV host. Bourdain’s insatiable hunger to understand the world in all its diversity was infectious, radically changing food and travel television.