What’s on TV Sunday: ‘First Ladies Revealed’ and ‘Pride of the Yankees’

Photo

The Smithsonian Channel explores the public and private lives of first ladies. And MLB Network celebrates the coming 75th anniversary of “The Pride of the Yankees” with a look at the making of the movie.

What’s on TV

AMERICA IN COLOR 8 p.m. on Smithsonian. Five decades of historical events normally portrayed in black and white — from the Roaring Twenties to the Depression to the war era to Elvis and civil rights — are brought to life in a five-part series being promoted as one of the most ambitious colorizing projects ever undertaken. “Something about the color images makes clearer on an emotional level that these ancestors felt fear and uncertainty, just as we do, and were fallible and sometimes cruel, just as we are,” Neil Genzlinger wrote in The New York Times. “FIRST LADIES REVEALED,” a four-part series making its debut at 9, explores the public achievements and private lives of Dolley Madison, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jacqueline Kennedy, Nancy Reagan and Michelle Obama.

THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES (1942) 9 p.m. on MLB Network. In honor of the 75th anniversary of this film’s release on July 15, 1942, as well as commemorating Lou Gehrig’s farewell at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939, Bob Costas interviews Richard Sandomir, a reporter for The Times and the author of “The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper, and the Making of a Classic,” before and after the screening.

What’s Streaming

Photo

ELLE (2016) on iTunes and Amazon. Isabelle Huppert earned her first best actress Oscar nomination — and won a Golden Globe — as Michèle Leblanc, a video game executive who is raped and then turns the tables on her attacker as he returns, again and again. “You may find yourself in an argument about just what kind of movie you saw,” A. O. Scott wrote in The Times about Paul Verhoeven’s “masterpiece of suave perversity.” He added: “It’s a psychological thriller, a strangely dry-eyed melodrama, a kinky sex farce and, perhaps most provocatively, a savage comedy of bourgeois manners. Mostly, though — inarguably, I would say — it is a platform for the astonishing, almost terrifying talent of Isabelle Huppert.”

Photo

JULIETA (2016) on iTunes and Amazon. A Spanish woman (Adriana Ugarte as Julieta in her 20s; Emma Suárez as Julieta in middle age) ends a romantic relationship and plunges into a sea of reminiscences and regrets in Pedro Almodóvar’s adaptation of a trilogy of Alice Munro short stories. “Scrupulous, compassionate and surprising,” A. O. Scott wrote in The Times, adding that if the film “does not rise to the level of Mr. Almodóvar’s melodramatic masterworks — ‘All About My Mother,’ ‘Talk to Her,’ ‘Bad Education’ or ‘Volver’ — ‘Julieta’ is nonetheless a worthy and welcome addition to his canon, the double portrait of a woman perpetually on the verge of understanding who she is.”

Continue reading the main story