We should all have such melancholy years in order to write Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, which is rescued from a train wreck in the first few minutes of Dickens. The novelist has just returned to England by ferry from France, with his mistress and her mother. They are on their way to London when the night train jumps the tracks, killing 10 and injuring 40. Dickens will first see the women into a carriage, and then fill his hat with water for the wounded, before he remembers the manuscript and risks his life to fetch it. Ackroyd doesn’t dwell on the contents of this dark novel—the double plot of adoption and inheritance, seduction and betrayal, blackmail and murder, alcoholism and grave-robbing, doll-making and taxidermy, Peeping Toms and disguised identities—because he is in a hurry to get on with the story. But the story is there in the novel, in the ash heaps of refuse and the polluted Thames, in the burial mounds of waste.
Trust Me (December 9; 10 to 11 p.m.; Showtime) spends the summer after 9/11 at a North Carolina camp where Christian, Muslim, and Jewish boys, ages 9 to 13, get to know each other and their respective faiths in spite of armed guards.
Eroica! (December 9; 10 to 11 p.m.; Channel 13) follows Sara Sant’Ambrogio (cello), Adela Peña (violin), and Erika Nickrenz (piano), who have known each other since Juilliard, to grammar schools, master classes, and concert halls all over the U.S. and Europe, playing Beethoven while they wait for Kevin Kaska to finish a triple concerto just for them.
Secret Santa (December 14; 9 to 11 p.m.; NBC) sends cynical journalist Jennie Garth to small-town America where, before she identifies a mysterious philanthropist–benefactor, she will discover the true meaning of every other holiday movie on television.
What I Want My Words to Do to You (December 16; 9 to 10:30 p.m.; Channel 13) sits in on Eve Ensler’s writing workshop in the Bedford Hills maximum-security prison for women, where the words these women write are then performed by Mary Alice, Glenn Close, Hazelle Goodman, Rosie Perez, and Marisa Tomei.
Remember the Alamo (December 16; 9 to 10:30 p.m.; History Channel) gives the Mexican side of the story, too. Slavery was an issue. Did you know that in 1836, slavery was against the law in Mexico?
Email
Print
Eight Year-End Films Vie for Oscar Contention
Sondheim and Lansbury on a Lifetime in Theater
The Black Keys Release Their Hip-hop Debut 
How the BQE Became an Artistic Muse
On Great Jones Street, Shopping Is Art 
Classic Fare, Old-world Charm at Le Caprice
Buy a Brownstone for Less Than $1 Million
Fifty of the City's Tastiest Soups
Reasons to Love New York 2009
New York Politicians Refuse to Quit
A-Rod Has Babe Ruth in His Sights
McCain Yields to the Party's Pressure
