TV: Five shows worth watching tonight: Dec. 13
A select viewing guide for Tuesday, Dec. 13
MUSIC Glee Fox, Global, 8 p.m. You just know the festive season is a big deal for the singing-and-dancing teens of McKinley High. The brisk network description for tonight’s holiday-themed episode says that the New Directions glee club is in a quandary when they commit to perform at two holiday events on the same day at the same time. However, when series star Matthew Morrison (Mr. Schue to you) appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! last week, he let slip the news that the show will be a split-homage to Judy Garland’s 1963 TV holiday extravaganza and the infamous 1978 Star Wars Christmas special. The special guest: Chewbacca himself!
COMEDY Gerry Dee: Life After Teaching CBC, 9 p.m. Who the heck is Gerry Dee and how did he get his own CBC comedy series? This special serves to introduce viewers to the entertaining Mr. Dee, whose new sitcom, er, Mr. D, debuts next month on our public broadcaster. The new show casts him as a schoolteacher, which, as this program shows, is a role that Dee actually held for nearly a decade before he switched to a standup-comedy career. Since then, Dee has appeared regularly in comedic reports on The Score and was a finalist on the NBC talent-search series Last Comic Standing. The clips of his routine on this special confirm he’s a pretty funny guy.
COMEDY Raising Hope Fox, CITY-TV, 9:30 p.m. Raising a young daughter alone isn’t always easy for the low-rent Jimmy (Lucas Neff) in this popular series. Tonight’s episode takes a note from It’s a Wonderful Life and finds our single-dad hero transported into a fantasy world where he experiences what life would be like had he never met his daughter Hope’s serial killer mom Lucy, played by guest star Bijou Phillips. Of course, when Jimmy finally snaps back to reality, he realizes he’s living in Potterville and the Bailey Building and Loan burned to the ground! Oh, wait, that was the original movie.
DRAMA Unforgettable CBS, CTV, 10 p.m. Still one of the few new fall shows to pull respectable ratings each week, this series casts former Without a Trace regular Poppy Montgomery as New York police detective Carrie Wells, who is afflicted with the extremely rare condition known as hyperthymesia. The condition allows Carrie to remember details of every single thing she sees or hears. The bad news is that she can never forget! Tonight, Carrie and her ex-cop beau Al (Dylan Baker) look into the murder of a renowned TV poltergeist investigator. Was his final ghost hunt his undoing?
MOVIE Fitzwilly TCM, 9:45 p.m. Released in the holiday season way back in 1967, this comedy was intended to cash in on the popularity of Dick Van Dyke, who was a familiar face to TV watchers following five seasons of The Dick Van Dyke Show. In this film, he played the charmingly larcenous butler Claude Fitzwilliam, a.k.a. Fitzwilly, who works for a dotty dowager (Edith Evans) in Manhattan. Turns out she’s penniless, yet still handing out huge cheques to charities. Fitzwilly’s solution involves knocking off banks and other institutions to cover the donations, until the old gal’s new secretary (Barbara Feldon) catches on.