Patty Duke among stars in ‘Love’
Patty Duke (“The Patty Duke Show”), Shelley Long (“Cheers”), Patrick Duffy (“Dallas”) and Bruce Boxleitner (“Babylon 5”) star in the 2006 romance “Falling in Love with the Girl Next Door” (9 p.m. tonight, Hallmark).
“Love” could be the least complicated early Valentine’s Day movie ever made.
Theresa (Crystal Allen) visits her mom, Bridget Connolly (Duke), at her picture-postcard house on Catalina Island, just off the California coast. There she meets Mark (Ken Marino), her former next-door neighbor and son of Betsy Lucas (Long).
For reasons too trite to expand upon here, Bridget and Lucas have been enemies and rival fussbudgets for years, each trying to outdo each other in the Martha Stewart department. But don’t go looking for any swordplay. In fact, the hostile hausfraus’ husbands (Duffy and Boxleitner) have been golf buddies for decades. So, if you predict that the kids will announce their engagement and that wacky “complications” will ensue, you wouldn’t be wrong.
Arguably, the strangest thing about “Love” is the relentless perfection of its Catalina Island setting. It’s so sunny, pretty and nice that I keep expecting “The Truman Show” to break out at any moment.
But those who don’t find the eternal sunshine of the spotless set as terrifying as I do, “Love” just might save the day. Pure fluff, “Love” provides harmless distraction for fans of four stars of prime time past.
Jim Nantz hosts “Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials” (8 p.m. tonight, CBS), a celebration of pitches past, evaluated by a panel of experts including Greg Gumbel, Dan Marino, Boomer Esiason and Shannon Sharpe.
It seems that everything that can be written about “Super Bowl XL” (3 p.m. Sunday, ABC) has already been written, at least twice.
So here’s a rough recap: There’s going to be a football game between Pittsburgh and Seattle. One of them will win.
There will be a lot of commercials, said to have been very expensive. The game will be exciting. Or maybe not.
It doesn’t matter, because the announcers will behave as if their lives and ours depended upon the outcome, which is odd because most viewers will forget the game and its winner within the next few weeks as they begin to anticipate the advent of spring and, better yet, spring training.
The game eventually will end. Then ABC will broadcast “Grey’s Anatomy” (7:15 p.m., time approximate due to football and post-game recap blather, ABC, TV). Both the game and “Grey” will probably get higher-than-normal ratings.
That’s all you need to know.
For the second consecutive year, Animal Planet counterprograms the Super event with “Puppy Bowl II” (3 p.m. Sunday, Animal Planet). The “bowl” consists of a room full of cute canines frolicking and licking each other for three hours.