Tomorrow night, Turner Classic Movies is running four Mel Brooks movies and then At the Circus with the Brothers Marx. On New Year's Eve, they're playing a lot of great rock n' roll flicks — Elvis on Tour, A Hard Day's Night, Gimme Shelter, Tommy and Jimi Hendrix and then on New Year's Day, they have six more Marx Brothers films. This info should please the three of my readers who don't already own multiple copies of all the Marx Brothers movies.
Their Neil Simon film fest kicks off the next day (January 1) with The Odd Couple (excellent), The Out-of-Towners (okay) and Come Blow Your Horn (avoid), hosted by our pal Ken Levine. Actually, don't avoid Come Blow Your Horn. Watch just to see how Ken finesses the fact that Norman Lear and Frank Sinatra ruined a perfectly good Neil Simon comedy.
MeTV starts running The Abbott & Costello Show in the wee small hours of the morning, beginning New Year's Day. I actually find those shows funnier than all but about six of the movies Bud and Lou made…and anything else they did in the fifties. You get all their best burlesque routines in pretty much their natural state without being shoehorned into a big, pointless plotline with a romantic sub-plot. It's just Bud and Lou plus the able support of Sid Fields, Joe Besser and a few other good folks.
The Late Late Show on CBS continues with Craig Ferguson reruns next week, then there will be guest hosts until James Corden takes over as host in March. All the announcements said that would happen on March 9 but when Corden was on last week with Craig, he said March 23 so I guess it's now March 23. He oughta know. In the meantime, Drew Carey hosts the week of January 5 and then the week of January 12, it's the ladies of the CBS daytime series, The Talk.
CNN is running Life Itself, the documentary on the life of film critic Roger Ebert, twice the evening of January 4. It's 6 PM and 8 PM on my set. That is all for now.