Hot Dots

by Clif Garboden

FRIDAY 20

9:00 (2) Evening at Pops. Guests (for this concert from a previous season) are Nanci Griffith and Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. (Until 10 p.m.)

10:00 (2) Great Performances: Linda Ronstadt's Canciones de Mi Padre. Former Stoned Pony frontwoman and '70s superstar Ronstadt found her roots a while back and is sticking to them. In this repeated special, she performs traditional Mexican folk/pop backed by an 18-piece mariachi band. (Until 11 p.m.)

SATURDAY 21

9:00 (2) Truly, Madly, Deeply (movie). The Juliet Stevenson show, with herself as a woman whose failure to come to, as they say, closure regarding her lover's death is further disrupted by his large-as-life return as a ghost. Alan Rickman cranks it down as the beloved spook. To be repeated on Sunday at 3 p.m. (Until 10:45 p.m.)

9:00 (10) Jack Reed: A Killer Amongst Us (movie). Star cops lose partners left and right. Tonight's Reed's turn. His is killed protecting Susan Ruttan (Roxanne from L.A. Law) from an assassin. Brian Dennehy survives to set things right. (Until 11 p.m.)

10:45 (2) The Man with the Golden Arm (movie). A rare/classic mix of all the expected 1955 high-end attributes (Otto Preminger direction, standout Elmer Bernstein score, and a cast headed by Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak, and Eleanor Parker) plus a then-startling measure of risk-taking. Frankie plays a junkie; Eleanor is his disabled wife. Kim, of course, is the effort's sex object. These famous films (and this one does stand the time test) often have period-typical -- now incongruous -- supporting casts. In this, look for Darren McGavin, and Arnold Stang! To be repeated on Sunday at 1 p.m. (Until 12:45 a.m.)

SUNDAY 22

4:00 (10) Basketball. The Charlotte Hornets versus the Phoenix Suns in WNBA play. Watching the Bulls beat the Jazz in a last-minute display of luck and unprecedented strategy convinced us that men's NBA play is seriously unenjoyable. You've got a bunch of guys who are way the heck too big to play basketball as it was intended, and especially inept at putting the ball in the hoop unless they can literally drop it in, spending most of their energy hitting opponents in the face with their elbows. Some sport. Has anybody else noticed that you don't have to be very bright to play that way? Okay, so the promise of the WNBA is that women basketball players are smarter and more skillful and (for now, anyway) shorter and less inclined to the displays of utterly poor sportsmanship that dominate male play. There is also hope that they know how (and when) to pass. Could this catch on? The league's male leadership is sure gonna try. And if the short-sighted advocates who want to mire women's hoop in irrelevant lesbian politics will just hush up, it might work. The only alternative is to raise the basket two feet and force the men to think on their feet.

9:00 (2) Masterpiece Theatre: Doctor Finlay: Burning Bridges. In another example of ultra-soft-sell, WGBH describes this episode thus: "The redecoration of Arden House turns out not to be nearly as lavish as Dr. Finlay had hoped." Perhaps there's a disastrous bridge fire to spice up the action. (Until 10 p.m.)

9:00 (12) The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (movie), part one. The title of this 1994 TV-movie tells all. At least, all we know. The story is told in flashbacks: Anne Bancroft narrates as the 99-year-old Lucy Marsden. Diane Lane is the younger Lucy, who apparently wasn't around for the Civil War but Donald Sutherland as husband William was and can't stop thinking about it. Cecily Tyson fits in somewhere. To be concluded on Tuesday beginning at 9 p.m. (Until 11 p.m.)

9:00 (6) The Night We Never Met (movie). Time-share bedroom farce about a piece of yuppie scum (Kevin Anderson) who sublets his New York apartment to Matthew Broderick and Annabella Sciorra -- on alternate days. They meet or they don't -- it's not clear from the title. Also featuring Louise Lasser, Justine Bateman, Doris Roberts, and Christine Baranski. (Until 11 p.m.)

9:00 (10) Honeymoon In Vegas (movie). Elvis lives (and flies) in this 1992 comedy. Nicolas Cage and Sarah Jessica Parker have a Vegas wedding, but Cage loses his bride to James Caan in a rigged poker game. Funnier than it sounds. Featuring Pat Morita, Anne Bancroft, Peter Boyle, and the Flying Elvises. (Until 11 p.m.)

Midnight (2) Cézanne. The life, works, and times of French post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), showcasing 100 paintings and 68 watercolors from the walls of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Until 1 a.m.)

MONDAY 23

8:00 (2) Evening at Pops. Keith Lockhart and the Poppers open the '97 season with an outpouring of praise for the "American Spirit," personified by soprano Dawn Upshaw's renditions of Rodgers & Hart's "Nobody's Heart" and "Little Girl Blue," and Boston Ballet's runthrough of Agnes de Mille's "Hoedown" from Aaron Copland's final-Jeopardy ballet Rodeo and Balanchine's "The Man I Love" pas de deux from his Gershwin suite Who Cares? CBS's Charles Osgood (boy, the Pops sure know their target demographic) hosts, performs a Stephen Foster banjo medley, and plays "Blue Moon" on the piano. And will the mad merriment never cease? It's the 100th anniversary of J.P. Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever." You can imagine the finale. (Until 9 p.m.)

9:00 (2) The American Experience: Vietnam: A Television History: Peace Is at Hand (1968-1973) and Homefront, USA. Now that Keith and the gang have us in a patriotic mood, it's time to remind ourselves that our country's government is responsible for thousands of pointless deaths in a war it lost in Southeast Asia. Tonight we look at that bum Nixon's phony efforts to make peace while bombing the shit out of North Vietnam and its "neutral" neighbors. The second hour looks at how Americans at home knew better and let the clowns in Washington know it. If you were alive during this dark era, you were defined by your stance on the war, and if you were for it, you were fuckin' wrong. Take that to your grave, jerk. No excuses on this one.

9:00 (6) Late for Dinner (movie). Peter Berg and Brian Wimmer star as two louts accidentally kept in suspended animation since the '60s. They awake. Wow, it's the '90s; Elvis is dead and Andrew Lloyd Weber isn't. (Until 11 p.m.)

TUESDAY 24

8:00 (2) Nova: The Secrets of Making Money. Homage to the new $100 bill and how cleverly it's booby-trapped to discourage counterfeiters (who, now that we think of it, will probably be watching this). To be repeated on Wednesday at midnight. (Until 9 p.m.)

9:00 (2) Cadillac Desert: Mulholland's Dream. The kickoff of a four-part series based on Marc Reisner's book about the water fights and irrigation plans that made the American West farmable. Tonight we get the facts behind Polanski's Chinatown -- how visionaries and crooks joined forces to water LA. Alfre Woodard narrates. (Until 10:30 p.m.)

9:00 (12) The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (movie), part two. The conclusion. (Until 11 p.m.)

10:30 (2) P.O.V.: Jesse's Gone. A film documenting the aftermath of the death of Oakland rapper Jesse Hall, whose voice (these are Channel 2's promo words, God knows not ours) "could not be silenced by the snap of a clip and a pull on a trigger." Yo, 'GBH. Get, how you say, down. (Until 11:30 p.m.)

WEDNESDAY 25

9:00 (2) Great Performances: Suzanne Farrell: Elusive Muse. This revealing Oscar-nominated documentary features Farrell outlining her 20-year stint as choreographer George Balanchine's definitive ballerina. With collateral interviews with dance-partners Edward Villella and Jacques d'Amboise and numerous performance clips, including Apollo, Don Quixote, and Slaughter on Tenth Avenue. (Until 10:30 p.m.)

9:00 (12) Gunsmoke: The Long Ride (movie). Matt Dillon came out of retirement for this 1993 TV-movie where he chases bad guys. James Arness is on hand, as are Ali MacGraw and James Brolin. (Until 11 p.m.)

THURSDAY 26

8:00 (38) The Beguiled (movie). WSBK describes this 1971 Clint Eastwood movie thus: "A wounded Union corporal finds refuge in a Southern girls' school and makes love to all the inmates." Actually, that's the description for the never-produced triple-X epic Yankee Do-It Dandy: The Blue (and Gray) Movie. Clint does end up captured and wounded at a girls' school, but his presence is felt somewhat more psychologically than is implied above. (Until 10 p.m.)

9:00 (2) Mystery: Maigret: Maigret and the Minister. Maigret (Michael Gambon) delves into politics, clean and dirty. (Until 10 p.m.)

10:00 (6) Peter Jennings Reporting: The CIA and Saddam. No details forthcoming, but let's guess. An agency of our stupid government probably gave guns and money to that guy George Bush told us to hate. Or perhaps they tried to slip him an exploding cigar. Either way, we're betting they did something disreputable. (Until 11 p.m.)