Faces from the past act their age
Where do TV stars go when they’re not afraid to act their age? The Hallmark Channel, it seems. 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” (8 p.m. today, 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. Comparisons to the Montagues and Capulets are invoked quickly and awkwardly. So if you predict that the kids will announce their engagement and that wacky “complications” will ensue, you wouldn’t be wrong.
¢Jim Nantz is host of “Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials” (7 p.m. today, 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 (5 p.m. Sunday, ABC) already has 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 will end eventually. Then ABC will broadcast “Grey’s Anatomy” (9:15 p.m., time approximate due to football and postgame recap blather, ABC). Both the game and “Grey” probably will 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” (2 p.m. Sunday, Animal Planet). The “bowl” consists of a room full of cute canines frolicking and licking each other for three hours. Animal Planet will repeat these captivating kennel capers at 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., offering viewers nine solid hours of dogged distraction from the big game. And by way of offering equal time, Animal Planet has sweetened the pot with a new halftime show: “The Kitty Bowl.”
¢Convinced that its audience probably doesn’t give a hoot about football, Lifetime wraps up one of its longest-running series, “Strong Medicine” (8 p.m. Sunday, Lifetime), somewhere between the third and fourth quarters.
“Medicine” ends its sixth season with Lu (Rosa Blasi) delivering her own baby under less-than-ideal circumstances.






