What to watch this week
Two HBO shows clean up their acts for basic cable, and do we have the next "High School Musical" on our hands?
Two HBO series, “The Sopranos” and “The Wire,” are exposed to a non-HBO audience for the first time, “The Sopranos” at 8 p.m. Wednesday (CT) on A&E, with “The Wire” scheduled directly opposite to it at 8 p.m. on BET. (It's a smart move by BET, whose executives surely know which HBO show its audience would rather watch.) A&E helpfully sent along before-and-after screeners to show how little tampering was done with the program. The shot of the World Trade Center, removed from later seasons, is left in the opening credits. Alternate scenes were filmed during the show's production with alternate swear words (let's just say they get their freak on quite a bit in the episode I watched). As for the nudity, fuhgeddaboutit. The result is still very much a “Sopranos” episode, but a show so packed with simple pleasures is bound to be poorer for all the cuts. We won't see, for instance, naked dancers cavorting a few feet away from Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) as he intently studies a book on elder care at the Bada Bing, and we'll never hear what A.J. (Robert Iler) really thinks about missing his grandmother's baked ziti. But hey, that's why they sell DVDs and HBO subscriptions, right?
If you already have HBO, another excellent choice tonight is “China from the Inside,” a two-week, four-hour look inside the politics and culture of that country. It touches a lot of the hot buttons that the inferior “Discovery Atlas” travelogue on China studiously avoided, like the continuing dominance of the Chinese Communist Party and religious oppression of the nation's Catholics, Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong adherents. Part one is at 9 p.m. Wednesday on many PBS stations (check listings).
One year ago, the Disney Channel aired an original movie that at the time, struck a lot of non-teenage TV critics as little more than more teenage bubblegum fare. That was before “High School Musical” became the highest-rated movie in the channel's history, one of the most talked-about TV shows all year and a worldwide phenomenon. So to be sure, I watched “Jump In!”, a story about competitive double Dutch jump rope that premieres at 7 p.m. CT Friday on the Disney Channel. Though it may not be the next “High School Musical,” this movie has a few things going for it, including a buoyant soundtrack, appealing leads Corbin Bleu (from what else, “High School Musical”) as a teenage boxing hopeful who joins a girls' double Dutch team (which features Keke Palmer of “Akeelah and the Bee”). But the overedited finale -- a predictable jump-off to determine who's the baddest rope-skippers of them all -- doesn't do for double Dutch what the movie “Drumline” did for marching bands.
