1) Football, all day. The new playoff plan has tripleheaders today and Sunday. The six winners – plus the Chiefs and Packers, who have byes – return next weekend, two steps from the Super Bowl. Today has the Bills and Colts at 1:05 p.m. ET on CBS and the Rams and Seahawks at 4:40 p.m. on Fox. At 8:15, NBC has Tom Brady’s Tampa Bay (shown here) facing Washington, the only play-off team with a losing record. Read more…
1) “Frontliine,” 9 p.m., PBS. Breaking its usual pattern, “Frontline” is showing a film it didn’t make. That’s partly a bad thing; “A Thousand Cuts” has a scattered approach, without the direct power we expect from “Frontline.” Still, this has an important story: Maria Ressa (shown here) is a Filipino native who became a New Jersey teen, a CNN bureau chief and founder of the Rappler reporting website in the Philippines. As Rappler questioned President Rodrigo Duterte, he attacked “fake news” and “presstitutes.” Read more…
For a decade, TV viewers knew what to expect from PBS.
A lush “Masterpiece” series would settle into Sundays each January and beyond. There were six seasons of “Downton Abbey,” three of “Victoria,” one of “Sanditon”
And now? “All Creatures Great and Small” (shown here, 9 p.m., starting Jan. 10, check local listings) has much in common with “Downton,” including the same director. But it has a crucial difference:
“We have made a lot of excellent British television stories about people who are rich,” said Samuel West, who co-stars as Dr. Siegfried Farnon. This show, by comparison, “is ground-level stuff.” Read more…
