1) Country Music Association awards, 8-11 p.m. Wednesday, ABC. A tribute to the late Jimmy Buffett will be performed by his friends – Kenny Chesney, Alan Jackson (shown here with Buffett), Mac McAnally and the Zac Brown Band. Morgan Wallen will do a country medley with Hardy and Post Malone, then return with a surprise guest. Also performing: Luke Bryan (who hosts with Peyton Manning), Kelsea Ballerini, Dan + Shay, Jordan Davis, Ashley McBride and more.
2) “Big Brother” finale, 8-10 p.m. Thursday, CBS. The 25th season of this summer show started late, so it could sprawl into the fractured fall. Now, however, even that time has run out. There’s an episode at 8 p.m. Tuesday; then Thursday will name the $750,000 winner. That leaves holes, filled next week by overseas shows – on Tuesdays, the Australian “NCIS”; on Thursdays, the original, British “Ghosts,” plus reruns of “Young Sheldon” and the U.S. “Ghosts.”
3) “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” 8:30 p.m. Sunday, TNT. Now the Christmas season is going full-throttle: One of TV’s all-time best half-hours returns. It started with Dr. Seuss’ brilliant book, then added great animation by Chuck Jones (the genius behind Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner), plus Boris Karloff narrating and Thurl Ravenscroft booming the song about a mean one, Mr. Grinch. If you miss it, don’t worry; “Grinch” reruns at 5:30 p.m. the next day.
4) “Salute to Service: A Veterans Day Celebration,” 9 p.m. Friday, PBS. Jon Stewart talks with military heroes. There’s also music from Amanda Shires, country star Mickey Guyton, Broadway’s Mandy Gonzalez and the Army Field Band. On Saturday (which is Veterans Day), History has “Beyond the Battlefield” (8-10 p.m.) and Turner Classic Movies has a military marathon, including the Oscar-winning “Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) at 5 p.m. ET.
5) “The Morning Show” season-finale and “The Buccaneers” debut, Wednesday, Apple TV+. Two superb series are opposites in one way: “Morning” is set at a modern TV network where women (played by Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, etc.) show power and ambition. “Buccaneers,” set in the 1870s, has American women collide with rigid British society. Both are brilliantly written and played, especially by Kristine Froseth in “Buccaneers.”
6) “Kitchen Nightmares.” 8 p.m. today, Fox. At a restaurant called Juicy Box, Gordon Ramsay is startled to hear a cheery waitress say, “the juicer is kind of like broken.” So is a walk-in refrigerator; it should be 38-40 degrees, but is now 74. This hour – set for Oct. 23, then delayed for two weeks because of baseball – is a good one. The people are likable, but flailing; there are no printed menus and the opening time switched from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m.
7) “FBI True,” 9 p.m. Tuesday, CBS. This is a good week for true stories based on FBI history. At 10 p.m. Wednesday, Investigation Discovery debuts “Feds”; first, CBS offers two stories: More than 40 officers converged on a Los Angeles suburb of 14,000 that was battered by a gang. That’s followed at 9:30 by a story from 2010: A T-shirt vendor saw someone set a truck on fire in Times Square. The FBI rushed to immobilize the threat and find the bomber.
8) “The Hammer” (2022), 10:03 p.m. Saturday, Lifetime. A week later (Nov. 18-19), Lifetime will start showing a new Christmas film every Saturday and Sunday. It will join a line-up that already has Hallmark, Great American Family and UpTV. First, Lifetime has one more crime-filled Saturday – an obsessive EMT at 6 p.m., obsessive delivery dispatcher at 8 and this clever rerun, with Reba McEntire as a no-nonsense judge in rural stretches of Nevada.
9) “Saturday Night Live,” 11:29 p.m. Saturday, NBC. After a one-week break, “SNL” is back with its fourth new episode of the season. It’s the second time as host for Timothee Chalomet, 27, who co-starred in Greta Gerwig films (“Lady Bird,” “Little Women”), starred in “Dune” and has “Wonka” coming on Dec. 15. When he hosted “SNL” previously, Bruce Springsteen was the music guest; this time, it’s the three-woman indie group called Boygenius.
10) ALSO: On Tuesday, “Wipeout” – the messy action game show – starts its season at 9 p.m. on TBS; at 10, FX’s non-fiction “Welcome to Wrexham” is a week from its season-finale, with a soccer-league promotion at stake. And on Sunday, two series debut: In “Beacon 23” (9 p.m., MGM+), wary strangers inhabit an outer-space lighthouse; in “The Curse” (10 p.m., Showtime), newlyweds host a house-flipping show while facing an alleged curse.
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