Oscar season reminds us that keeping up with the sheer number of award shows can be a full-time job. CBS informs us that the Family Film and TV Awards (8 p.m. Saturday, TV-PG) is now in its 25th year. How did I miss the first 24?
Akbar Gbajabiamila and Amanda Kloots are your hosts. Both are regulars on the CBS chat show “The Talk,” and they aren’t the only aspect of this show to promote homegrown talent. The nominations are heavy on series and movies from the CBS and Paramount+ firmament, from “The Neighborhood” to the “Star Trek” franchise.
As with most award shows, the categories are a confusing bag. There seem to be as many “all-time” selections as honors for films and shows produced in 2023.
Even these “classic” nominations can be revealing. And confusing. Of those movies nominated as all-time family favorites, the oldest film, “E.T.,” dates back to 1982. But among TV series, the newest series, “Family Matters” is from 1989. Those choices essentially exclude TV shows from the last 35 years and a wealth of family-friendly content from Nickelodeon and Disney, among others, not to mention network efforts like “Malcolm in the Middle.” Did “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” cast a spell of amnesia over an entire generation’s viewing habits? Even with its accent on the golden oldies (“I Love Lucy,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “The Brady Bunch”) it ignores “The Waltons” and “Little House on the Prairie,” series that wore their family-friendliness on their gingham sleeves.
And the 1980s cutoff for films pretty much stacks the deck in the opposite direction. Is there any doubt that G-rated films like “The Sound of Music” would clean up at such awards? Would the nominated film “The Sandlot” (1993) really stand up against omitted movies including “A Christmas Story”? Or for that matter “It’s a Wonderful Life”?
One has to wonder just what the folks at Popstar! magazine were thinking when they dreamed up these nominations. Tonight’s awards are a collaboration between the brain trust at Popstar! and those of Dick Clark Productions.
Help yourself.
— In a world where celebrities can seem more fleeting every day, those famous faces that stick around are all the more remarkable. And rare. The aptly titled four-part series “The Many Lives of Martha Stewart” (9 p.m. and 10 p.m. Sunday, CNN, concluding next Sunday) profiles the changing fortunes and enduring appeal of a woman who has been an arbiter of “lifestyle” pretty much since that term was coined.
“Lives” includes dozens of interviews with everyone, it seems, except its subject or her first husband. Friends and former friends, colleagues of long standing and those left by the wayside during her ascent chime in on the character and personality traits that helped her in her meteoric rise, spectacular fall and remarkable comeback.
In the first hour, we encounter an unusually determined, disciplined and hard-working high school student who spent her free time in New York City as a model, earning enough to put herself through Barnard College. A full decade before feminism began to define women’s expectations and relationship to home, family and career, Stewart worked on Wall Street in a brokerage firm headed by men visionary enough to see that a smart woman attractive and poised enough to have been a model might attract business in a field dominated by an old boys’ network.
To use a rather hifalutin word, Stewart’s career and life has always been counterintuitive. By the early 1970s, when feminism was in full bloom, Stewart and her husband decided to buy and restore a historic estate in Connecticut. So, when mass culture was telling women that domestic life was drudgery, Martha Stewart embraced decorating, cooking and entertaining with an artist’s eye for detail and a businesswoman’s vision for expansion.
Even from the beginning, we meet people who recall how Stewart’s ambition earned both admiration and resentment.
Starting a catering company in Connecticut, she recruited other smart and talented women to prepare the food to her exacting specifications. But with the publication of her book “Entertaining” in 1982 and her many TV appearances to promote it and her emerging “brand,” Stewart’s many collaborators went unmentioned, uncredited and unrewarded. In a jarring clash of recollections, a New Yorker contributor discusses collaborating with Stewart on “Entertaining,” while in archived interviews, Stewart only talks of writing the book herself.
One woman who had been with Stewart’s catering company from the beginning had the temerity to ask for a business title, or something to distinguish her efforts from that of a mere hourly employee. She sadly recalls Stewart’s husband Andy’s brusque reply: “Martha’s going to be as big as McDonald’s. And we’re not giving any of that away.”
SATURDAY’S HIGHLIGHTS
— Connecticut hosts Notre Dame in women’s college basketball (8 p.m., Fox).
— An ambitious teen creates an explicit site to earn tuition for her fashion school in the 2024 shocker “Confessions of a Cam Girl” (8 p.m., Lifetime, TV-14).
— A former dancer and a professional aerialist take their positions in the 2024 comedy “Romance With a Twist” (8 p.m., Hallmark, TV-G).
— The 2023 performance film “Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero” (8 p.m., HBO, TV-MA) follows the rapper on his first tour.
— The Golden State Warriors host the Los Angeles Lakers in NBA basketball action (8:30 p.m., ABC).
— A diet-obsessed mom overlooks her daughter’s eating disorder in the 2024 shocker “Dying in Plain Sight” (10 p.m., Lifetime, TV-14).
— Dakota Johnson hosts “Saturday Night Live” (11:30 p.m., NBC, TV-14), featuring musical guest Justin Timberlake.
SUNDAY’S HIGHLIGHTS
— The San Francisco 49ers host the Detroit Lions in the NFC Championship game (6:30 p.m., Fox).
— Scheduled on “60 Minutes” (7 p.m., CBS): The federal prison system in crisis; Interpol at work; an animal sanctuary in Colorado.
— Lindsay Lohan, Dennis Quaid and Natasha Richardson star in the 1998 remake of “The Parent Trap” (8 p.m., ABC, TV-PG).
— A blast from Eliza’s past on “Miss Scarlett and the Duke” on “Masterpiece” (8 p.m., PBS, TV-PG, check local listings).
— A mysterious ailment thins the herd on “All Creatures Great and Small” on “Masterpiece” (9 p.m., PBS, TV-PG, check local listings).
— Spade tries to understand the mysterious young boy behind so much intrigue on “Monsieur Spade” (9 p.m., AMC, TV-MA).
— Get ready for the bleakest Christmas Eve episode of any series ever on “True Detective: Night Country” (9 p.m., HBO, TV-MA).
— Lorna maintains a sleepless vigil on “The Woman in the Wall” (9 p.m., Showtime, TV-MA).
— A backstage romance on “Funny Woman” (10 p.m., PBS, TV-14, check local listings).
CULT CHOICE
The voices of Judy Garland, Robert Goulet and Red Buttons animate the 1962 musical “Gay Purr-ee” (2 p.m. Sunday, TCM, TV-G). While critically praised and visually sophisticated, this effort sailed over the heads of its intended juvenile audience. A box-office bomb, it predated Disney’s Broadway-level animated musicals by a quarter-century.
SATURDAY SERIES
“The Wall” (8 p.m., NBC, r, TV-PG) …”48 Hours” (9 p.m., r, and 10 p.m., CBS) … “Weakest Link” (9 p.m., NBC, r, TV-PG) … A vintage helping of “Saturday Night Live” (10 p.m., NBC, r, TV-14).
SUNDAY SERIES
On three episodes of “Yellowstone” (CBS, TV-MA): Beth spills secrets (8 p.m.); so does Jamie (9 p.m.); Beth tangles with Hayes (10 p.m.) … “America’s Got Talent: Fantasy League” (8 p.m., NBC, r, TV-PG) … “Next Level Chef” (10 p.m., Fox, TV-14) … Nobody minds being sent to the principal’s office on “Abbott Elementary” (10:30 p.m., ABC, r, TV-PG).
