Thanksgiving 2025 briefs

For those of us in the US, today is Thanksgiving, which among other things means programming changes on a lot of regular channels before the Christmas season kicks off. (I'll probably start thinking of Christmas on Sunday, which I think is the first Sunday of Advent for those of us born Catholic.) TCM tends to have more family-friendly programming on the day, and is doing that again this year. Apparently, Carol Burnett is back for two nights to present a bunch of movies most of which she parodied on The Carol Burnett Show back in the 1960s and 1970s. I'm too young for the original Carol Burnett Show, although I was a very young kid when the comedy skits were cut up and put into a syndicated Carol Burnett and Friends package, so I remember some skits from there. Sorry.

Speaking of the TCM website, it's gotten another downgrade in the past week or so, as the TCM Database is no longer there. I liked to use it when I was writing up a post on a movie that I had watched off my DVR but not gotten around to doing the blog post on yet, as the TCM database tended to have the best synopsis for jogging my memory as I was rewatching the movie on the little video player in the corner of my computer screen. I also wonder whether it's eventually going to have a negative effect on getting the monthly schedules ahead of time, since the monthly schedule guide that TCM has is terrible: view "this month's highlights", without giving most of the daytime schedules.

And now that I'm looking at the monthly "highlights", I see something worse. I was looking at the monthly schedule somebody else was able to compile, which I downloaded just before the start of November. I noticed that Sunday night will have a two-movie tribute to Diane Ladd, who died at the beginning of the month: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore at 8:00 PM and Rambling Rose at 10:00 PM. Since I downloaded the schedule at the end of October, it was just before Ladd died at the age of 89. TCM's "highlights" page has it listed as "Diane Ladd's 90th birthday", as if she were still alive. Oh dear.

As for FXM's schedule, it still doesn't look like there's a whole lot that's been pulled out of the vault that hasn't been on the channel in a while. I do note, however, that I haven't done a post on the 1960s Pat Boone version of State Fair which is showing up on the schedule. So I'll have to record that and watch it for a future airing of the movie. I also forgot that FXM was one of the channels that Disney got when they bought out parts of Fox, as FXM was missing from my YouTube TV lineup for the first 10 days of November or so when YouTube TV and Disney had their contract dispute.