New Reindeer in Town, New Cross to Bear on ‘Monarch,’ 20 Years of ‘Love, Actually,’ End of ‘Sugar’

Reindeer in Here

Rudolph has company. Following the annual broadcast of the 1964 classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed-Reindeer (8/7c), CBS introduces another offbeat reindeer, name of Blizzard (“Blizz”), in a new animated special that hopes to join the ranks of year-after-year favorites. Based on the holiday book by Adam Reed, Reindeer in Here teams Blizz (voiced by Adam Devine), whose distinctive feature is mismatched antlers, with lonely 10-year-old Theo (Gabriel Bateman) and snowgirl-friend Candy (SNL’s Melissa Villaseñor), to save Christmas after a snow globe that holds every child’s wishes goes missing. Among others providing voices: Jim Gaffigan as Santa and Henry Winkler as elf extraordinaire Smiley.

Monarch

Hard not to get Melrose Place vibes when prime-time soap queen Marcia Cross (Desperate Housewives) returns to Fox as Skyler Samuels, a media-conglomerate mogul who’s stirring up family conflict as the country-music drama nears the end of its first season. She has a tempting offer—to business-minded Luke (Joshua Sasse), anyway—that could take the Roman family’s Monarch label to the next label, but old-school patriarch Albie (Trace Adkins) won’t hear of it. Pitting father against son, and daughter against daughter, is the Monarch way, and muddying the waters is politically motivated D.A. Tripp (D.W. Moffett), putting legal pressure on Albie to come clean about the murder and cover-up that has haunted the Romans all season.

Love Actually: 20 Years Later

For those whose first reaction to the 2003 holiday favorite Love, Actually is to quote “To me, you are perfect,” this affectionate look back is an early Christmas gift. Diane Sawyer interviews the film’s stars, including Hugh Grant (who confesses he was reluctant to do the now-famous dance scene to “Jump”), Emma Thompson, Laura Linney and Bill Nighy, as well as writer-director Richard Curtis. The special also reflects on how the COVID-19 pandemic reinforced the movie’s themes of love and connection.

Queen Sugar

directs the final 90 minutes of the Louisiana-set drama, signing off after seven seasons. The episode finds the Bordelons facing off with the Landrys in one last battle for their sugarcane farm. DuVernay’s take: “I feel like I’ve done everything I’ve set out to do.”

Inside Tuesday TV:

• My So-Called High School Rank (9/8c, HBO): It’s a real-life High School Musical, as students at Sacramento’s Granite Bay High School create a new musical, Ranked, about the pressures of college admissions. And just as this documentary reveals how other high schools across the country express interest in licensing and staging the show, the pandemic hits.
• CMT Crossroads: Robert Plant & Alison Krauss (9/8c, CMT): The singer-songwriters, who first appeared together on Crossroads in 2008, return to perform from their Grammy-nominated Raise the Roof collaboration as well as a few selected Led Zeppelin classics.
• Fixer to Fabulous (9/8c, HGTV): Design pros Dave and Jenny Mars are back for a fourth season of home renovations, starting with the transformation of a 1980s ranch home belonging to a local business owner and her Olympic athlete husband.
• True Crime Watch: On Netflix, a third season of the geographically focused Crime Scene series, subtitled The Texas Killing Fields, tracks a series of unsolved murders in the 1980s through 1991 of women whose bodies were found in land along the interstate connecting Houston and Galveston. Peacock’s three-part Casey Anthony: Where the Truth Lies features an in-depth interview with Anthony, 11 years after her controversial acquittal in the murder trial of her 2-year-old daughter Caylee.
• Behind the Music (streaming on Paramount+): A new season of the classic VH1 franchise includes new episodes featuring Jennifer Lopez, Boy George, country’s Jason Aldean and hip hop’s Remy Ma, plus remastered episodes spotlighting Boyz II Men, Christina Aguilera, Gloria Estefan, Hootie & the Blowfish, Motley Crüe, Pink and TLC.
• Welcome to Chippendales (streaming on Hulu): In the third chapter of the engrossing docudrama, club founder Steve Banerjee (Kumail Nanjiani) returns from an ego-deflating trip home to India and puts the “rant” in tyrant when he reminds choreographer Nick De Noia (Murray Bartlett) who’s the boss.