Dolly’s ‘Mountain Magic Christmas’ and More Holiday TV, Leslie Jordan’s Final ‘Kat’ Episode, All About Branson, Ava Gardner’s Star Rises

Living legend Dolly Parton goes meta with her newest TV-movie charmer, which fits behind the scenes of the making of a dwell Dolly Yuletide particular, filmed on location at Tennessee’s Dollywood. It’s a down-home comedy of backstage errors and delights, with loads of music, 19 tunes in all together with “9 to 5” and “When Life Is Good Again,” that includes visitors Jimmy Fallon, Jimmie Allen, Miley Cyrus and because the Three Wise Mountain Men, Willie Nelson, Zach Williams and Billy Ray Cyrus. If you miss it, NBC airs it once more on Dec. 21. Followed by Deck the Wall: A Holiday Spectacular (10/9c), a particular episode of the sport present The Wall, wherein Cassandra, a mom and pastor from Aurora, Ohio, groups with social-worker daughter Victoria to reply holiday-themed trivia questions, hoping the balls drop of their favor for some massive cash.

One extra probability to savor the scene-stealing of beloved comedian character actor Leslie Jordan, who filmed his last efficiency for this sitcom earlier than his premature loss of life in October. The episode revolves round Kat’s (Mayim Bialik) Friendsgiving dinner, with a homicide thriller theme that doesn’t sit effectively together with her visitors, whereas Phil (Jordan) has a romantic dilemma. He shall be missed.

A four-part docuseries from filmmaker Chris Smith (100 Foot Wave) profiles the adventurous billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson, who sits for an interview shortly earlier than his historic July 2021 house flight aboard the Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity. The first chapter follows his youthful exploits as he leaves faculty as a dyslexic teenager, creates {a magazine} and a mail-order file enterprise that may result in his triumphant launch of Virgin Records and megastores.

The classic film channel’s “Star of the Month” is the glamorous cinema siren Ava Gardner (1922-1990), whose breakthrough efficiency as femme fatale Kitty Collins within the Hemingway-inspired 1946 movie noir traditional launches a month-long tribute on Thursdays. Followed by her look reverse Clark Gable in 1947’s The Hucksters (10/9c), a sendup of radio promoting.

More from the ever-popular Yule TV Log:

• Sesame Street’s The Nutcracker (streaming on HBO Max): The Tchaikovsky traditional will get a Sesame Street spin courtesy of Elmo and his pet Tango, who speaks for the primary time.
• A Hollywood Christmas (streaming on HBO Max): More meta vacation enjoyable in a making-of-a-Christmas-movie flick starring Jessika Van because the harried filmmaker who clashes, then falls for, the studio go well with (Josh Swickard) supervising manufacturing on a backlot in July.
• Serving Up the Holidays (8/7c, Lifetime): Britt Irvin and Zach Roerig are rival cooks studying to whip up some Christmas spirit at a villa’s vacation cooking retreat.
• Rolling into Christmas (streaming on BET+): Rhyon Nicole Brown and Donny Carrington are former childhood sweethearts who bonded over curler skating as soon as upon a time. Can they recapture the magic after they reunite 15 years later?

Inside Thursday TV:

• Frozen II (8/7c, ABC): The broadcast premiere of 2019’s hit animated sequel is adopted by a rebroadcast of a 2019 holiday-themed episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos (10/9c).
• Flip or Flop: The Final Flip (8/7c, HGTV): Tarek El Moussa and Christina Hall reunite for another home flip—fittingly, in Sunset Beach, California—then trip off with some reminiscing. Followed by the sequence premiere of Luxe for Less (9/8c), the place luxurious dwelling designer Michel Smith Boyd affords tips about find out how to create a high-end look with out breaking the financial institution, or as his purchasers put it, obtain “a yacht life on a pontoon budget.”
• Ghost Adventures: House Calls (9/8c, Travel Channel): The crew investigates haunted homes on this spinoff, beginning with a darkish pressure in a California dwelling that has connected itself to a husband who desires solutions earlier than his household is torn aside.
• The Territory (10/9c, National Geographic): A documentary follows the battle over preserving the Brazilian Amazon rainforest when the Indigenous Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau folks combat to maintain the protected land from being burned and cleared by farmers and unlawful settlers. Available for streaming on Disney+ beginning Friday.
• Gossip Girl (streaming on HBO Max): More shiny teen angst is on the Season 2 syllabus because the up to date revival of the CW sequence picks up within the second semester of Junior yr, with Gossip Girl creating extra havoc on social media. Also again for a second season: the comedy Sort Of, starring sequence co-creator Bilal Baig as Sabi, the non-binary millennial offspring of Pakistani immigrant mother and father.
• Mr. Saturday Night (streaming on BroadwayHD): Billy Crystal earned a Tony nomination reprising his 1992 movie position, as pale TV comic Buddy Young Jr., in a latest stage musical from composer Jason Robert Brown.
• Agatha Christie’s Hjerson (streaming on Topic): A Swedish comedy-mystery revives Christie’s character of prison profiler Sven Hjerson (the creation of fictional thriller author Ariadne Oliver), who’s introduced out of retirement by a TV producer who desires to function him in a true-crime sequence.
• Inside the Black Box (streaming on Crackle): Hosts Joe Morton (Scandal) and performing coach/casting director Tracey Moore welcome a second spherical of movie star visitors to debate race and present enterprise, together with Debbie Allen, Keith David, Jeffrey Wright, Malik Yoba, Wendell Pierce and Ruben Santiago-Hudson.