Journey to Christmas
Saturday, 7 p.m., CTS
It's the official start of the holiday season on TV. We know this because It's a Wonderful Life airs tonight (NBC, CTV, 8 p.m.). This program is rather different. It follows the eye-opening travels of six people of varying religious backgrounds, as they experience the Holy Land for the first time and search for what the program calls "a deeper meaning to Christmas." Beautifully made with startling visuals, it is essentially a reality show with grave spiritual undertones. Local guides and other experts are interviewed to guide both the participants and viewers toward the roots of the story of the nativity. The dramatic recreations are, inevitably, rather creaky, but it is the reaction of the participants to the environment and the history explained to them that actually captivates.
GIA: Story of a Model
Saturday, HBO Canada, 8 p.m.
The HBO movie that made Angelina Jolie famous. Sex. Lesbian sex. Drugs. Gia isn't brilliant, but it's compellingly strange and lurid. Jolie is Gia, a working-class kid who tumbled into modeling and, with her raw sexual looks, instantly became a top model. She was also a little crazy – a punk kid at home in the alternative rock world of David Bowie wannabes and drug-addled pseudo-artists. Shallow, violent, impulsive, lesbian and utterly unwilling to stop taking cocaine, she threw her short life into a downward spiral that ended with her AIDS-related death from an infected needle in 1986. Jolie is charmingly enthusiastic in enacting it all, but the movie is too enthusiastic about letting the modelling business off the hook and blaming Gia's mother, played by Mercedes Ruehl, for all her problems.
Larry King Special: A Dinner with Kings
Sunday, CNN, 8 p.m.
Larry King hasn't really left CNN. Here, in one of the specials he now regularly contributes, he and his wife Shawn have dinner with Conan O'Brien, Tyra Banks, Russell Brand, Shaquille O'Neal, Quincy Jones, Seth MacFarlane and others. The dinner is, of course, prepared by a celebrity chef. In this case Wolfgang Puck. The topics under discussion for dinner are life, love, insecurities, success and failures. Really, though, it's insecurity that dominates. Conan O'Brien says: "There's a tendency for people to look at a table like some of the people that are here and say they've made it. They have it. And what they don't understand is the amount of insecurity that drives you when you're 15. But it's still there when you're 48." Further, Tyra Banks asserts she's not sexy: "I'm so not sexy. I know how to turn it on for a picture, but I'm not sexy in real life." Hey, Hollywood celebrities are just like you and me.
Pan Am
Sunday, ABC, CTV, 10 p.m.
It's hard to believe that this heavily promoted and much-talked-about show is in trouble. But it is. It hasn't been cancelled, but will disappear from the schedule in early 2012 and is a long shot for renewal. Little wonder, really. Expensive to make, it got attention but failed to capture a large, loyal following. While the initial attraction was the retro look and feel and the sense that it took viewers back to a more optimistic time, that sensibility evaporated and the show descended into low-grade soap-opera dramatics. Tonight, the Pan Am crew are in London, England. The plot synopsis is this: "Once in London, Ted enlists Laura's help to try to make an old flame jealous, but things don't go the way he expects. Maggie butts heads with a hawkish congressman who disagrees with her political views, but things really heat up when she tries to change his mind about his beliefs and ends up sparking an attraction with him." Hardly must-see TV. If you're addicted, watch it while you still can.
Check local listings.