“Girl’s Night Out: Superstar Women of Country”
Friday 9pm, CBS
While male country artists are generally too earnest for my taste, I love me some lady country musicians. My iPod is loaded with Dolly, Reba, Shania, Carrie, Faith, LeAnn, Dixie Chicks, SheDaisy and the like. So naturally I’m excited for this new Academy of Country Music special celebrating twang-tastic, down-home women. Among the honorees are comeback queens The Judds, icon Loretta Lynn, established workhorses Reba McEntire and Martina McBride, and up-and-comers like Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert and Jennifer Nettles. On top of that there’ll be a whole host of performers, including Vince Gill, Blake Shelton, John Fogerty and Little Big Town. Rascal Flatts is set to duet with Reba. Here’s hoping they sing “Fancy,” my favorite song about hookers.
The Ten Commandments
Saturday 7pm, ABC
It’s Easter weekend, and while you and your juvenile friends could spend the whole thing Peep jousting (easily the best use for those gag-worthy marshmallow “treats”), it’d be a shame if you didn’t set aside a few hours to get religulous with this biblical epic. Cecil B. DeMille’s Oscar-winning spectacle is 55 years old, and it runs nearly four hours. And sure, it looks a little quaint in our post-Avatar cinematic world, but at the time the film was a remarkable accomplishment. Commandments tells the story of Exodus, with Charlton Heston as Moses, plus Yul Brynner, Anne Baxter, Edward G. Robinson and a “cast of thousands!” They just don’t make ’em like this anymore, and if they tried to remake the flick today, it would probably be shortened to three commandments to appeal to the ADD-afflicted ’tween market, and Moses would get GPS directions out of the desert from his iPhone.
“MegaQuake: Hour that Shook Japan”
Sunday 10pm, Discovery
There are really no words that can capture the devastation that Japan has suffered since the March 11 earthquake and resulting tsunami that claimed at least 12,000 lives, destroyed entire towns, and left the country wrestling with a potential nuclear disaster rivaling Chernobyl. This one-hour special documents the catastrophe as it happened, through survivor testimonies and compiled footage of the quake, plus exclusives, like an audio clip from a hydro-acoustic station that recorded the actual sound of a 600 kilometer-long section of the earth’s crust rupturing and, according to a press release, “grinding against rock with the power of 600 million Hiroshima bombs.”