What’s on TV Wednesday: The Kennedy Center Honors and ‘Nova’

  The recipients of the 41st Annual Kennedy Center Honors.CreditCreditMichele Crowe/CBS

What’s on TV

THE 41ST ANNUAL KENNEDY CENTER HONORS 8 p.m. on CBS. In September, the singer Cher told The New York Times that her “favorite thing in the world is to rehearse.” The same month, the composer and saxophonist Wayne Shorter told The Times that he and his quartet “never rehearse anything.” Both creative methods have worked. This month Cher and Shorter, along with the country singer Reba McEntire and the composer Philip Glass, were the honorees at the 41st Annual Kennedy Center Awards, where the singer Gloria Estefan hosted a celebration of the four artists. The creators of “Hamilton” — Lin-Manuel Miranda, the director Thomas Kail, the choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler and the music director Alex Lacamoire — also received a special honor. The event includes tributes from Cyndi Lauper, Kelly Clarkson, Whoopi Goldberg and some of the original “Hamilton” cast members.

NOVA: APOLLO’S DARING MISSION 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). About six years after John F. Kennedy delivered the famous line “we choose to go to the moon” at a stadium in Texas, the astronauts aboard Apollo 8 became the first to orbit the moon. NASA’s eighth Apollo mission, 50 years old this month, is the subject of the latest episode of PBS’s “Nova” program. In it, astronauts and engineers discuss the sometimes-chaotic lead-up to the mission, which came less than two years after Apollo 1 ended with the deaths of three astronauts. Though the basic facts of the mission will be familiar to many, the program pays particular attention to the mission in the context of the Cold War. It also offers glimpses of the Apollo 8 astronauts’ personalities, as when William A. Anders says, in calculated terms, “We probably had one chance in three of making a successful flight.”

 

 AMERICAN DREAM/AMERICAN KNIGHTMARE (2018) 11:05 p.m. on Showtime. The 1990s rap tycoon Marion Knight, known as Suge, received renewed attention this year when he was sentenced to 28 years in prison for charges related to a fatal 2015 hit-and-run. This documentary, filmed years earlier and directed by Antoine Fuqua, consists of several interviews in which Knight, the founder and chief executive of Death Row Records, recounts that label’s rise. The label released formative music by Dr. Dre, Tupac Shakur and others. In a review of the documentary for Vulture, Paul Thompson wrote that “when you consider it a minor piece of the impressive and still-growing mountain of reporting on that moment in hip-hop history, it is interesting to see the myths Suge has led himself to believe.”

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Source: https: //www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/arts/television/whats-on-tv-wednesday-the-kennedy-center-honors-and-nova.html
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