Shows highlight relationships
Valentine’s Day on television arrives a few days early, albeit with some tales just short of romantic.
The three-part period drama “Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky” (8 p.m. tonight, 9 p.m., BBC America) follows overlapping tales of desperate longing, misunderstood intentions and bittersweet, unrequited love.
Bob (Bryan Dick), a barkeep with literary ambitions, develops an infatuation with the beautiful, doomed streetwalker Jenny (Zoe Tapper), while Ella (Sally Hawkins), a decent girl with a Louise Brooks hairdo and a thing for Bob, fends off unwanted advances from an older man.
Set in London during the Great Depression, “Streets” is well acted and beautifully produced, presented in muted colors with a maudlin, evocative soundtrack of 1930s popular songs.
The nuts and bolts of real romance get the once-over on the three-hour documentary “Love & Marriage – Real Journeys” (4 p.m. Sunday, MSNBC).
Documentary filmmaker Frederic Golding visits with couples struggling to keep their relationships together under the strains of careers and children.
One couple is getting a divorce, and another husband and wife suffer from wildly different perceptions of their duties. He tends to space out about the “details” of feeding their three kids and driving them to events, while she in turn nags him constantly, treating him like a fourth child.
Another couple, both gay men, raise adopted children in an uncertain legal environment.
In the midst of making “Love,” Golding undergoes the demise of his own 9-year-old marriage and struggles to be a good father while living 3,000 miles away from his children. He mourns the end of his marriage and considers divorce to be “the death of the dream of living happily ever after.”
On a lighter note, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy host “50 Best Chick Flicks” (8 p.m. Sunday, E!), a countdown of romantic popcorn movies with an accent on the MTV generation. In fact, all of these films are from after 1980, with the exception of “The Way We Were” (1973).
The words “James Lipton” and “hilarious” do not normally end up in the same sentence. But that changes when “Inside the Actors Studio” (8 p.m. Sunday, Bravo) invites comic and actor Dave Chappelle. The star of “Chappelle’s Show” seems uncomfortable talking about his background and biography at first, but he soon warms to the material.
Code black sparks fear of a pink mist on “Grey’s Anatomy” (10 p.m. Sunday, ABC). OK, last week’s post-Super Bowl episode had to be dramatic.
But the bomb-in-the-body plot seems like an “ER” sweeps stunt, and an old one at that. I thought “Grey” would take a few seasons to get this desperate.