Kristin (June 5; 9:30 to 10 p.m.; NBC) – with the pint-size Chenoweth as your basic twinkle-toes from true-blue Oklahoma who came to the corrupt metropolis in search of Broadway-musical fame and fortune but works instead for a sleazeball real-estate developer (Jon Tenney) – wastes her talent and our time on a sitcom that never got past the concept stage.
Don Quixote (June 6; 8 to 10 p.m.; PBS) rediscovers and remasters for the Great Performances series the 1973 film production of the 1869 ballet, choreographed, directed by, and starring Rudolf Nureyev.
The Sorrow and the Pity (June 6; 8 p.m. to 12:30 a.m.; TCM) is a restored version of the Marcel Ophüls masterpiece about how one small town in France collaborated with the Nazis in World War II. Watch for Pierre Mendès-France, who makes you feel better about the human race after the rest of the film has made you despair.
Walter and Henry (June 10; 8 to 9:30 p.m.; Showtime) sends a motherless 12-year-old (Nicholas Braun) from the Brooklyn streets to suburban New Jersey, where an aunt (Kate Nelligan) and a grandfather (James Coburn) he has never met are supposed to take care of him while his sax-playing ex-hippie father (John Larroquette) recovers from sex, drugs, and rock and roll in a mental hospital. In this lovely little movie, a piano is a boy’s best friend.
The Big Heist (June 10; 9 to 11 p.m.; A&E), revisiting the 1978 multi-million-dollar robbery in the Lufthansa Terminal at JFK, stars Donald Sutherland as Jimmy “the Gent” Burke, mastermind among midgets, and John Heard as Richard Woods, his cop nemesis. Far from the worst of the many films not worth watching; see this one for Sutherland.
Long Night’s Journey Into Day (June 11; 8 to 9:45 p.m.; HBO) picks up the work of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission almost exactly where Bill Moyers left off last year. Amy Biehl’s parents choose to forgive the four young black men who killed their Fulbright-scholar daughter; the families of the “Cradock 4” are not so kindly disposed toward the white security cop who murdered them; and then there’s the black cop who did to young people in his township exactly what his white apartheid masters told him to. It would seem that Archbishop Tutu is both an Ophüls and a Mendès-France.