“Threshold,” 8 p.m. Friday, WBBM-Ch. 2: The plot for Friday’s edition of this stylish drama sounds like a lost Parliament/Funkadelic song, maybe a hypothetical jam called “Aliens in the Disco.”
When a deejay puts an alien-derived audio signal into a dance remix at an illegal rave in Miami, things go very wrong, very quickly. The problem with this alien audio signal is that, as past episodes of “Threshold” have shown, people who get infected by it start acting very strangely.
“There’s this spectacular sequence at the rave where all the glass skylights break and people are bleeding and screaming and attacking each other,” says “Threshold” executive producer Brannon Braga. Disaster specialist Molly Caffrey (Carla Gugino) and her team go to Miami to investigate, all the while attempting to keep the news of the alien incursion a secret.
Keeping a lid on the dangerous deejay isn’t as easy as it sounds, though. “There’s a huge twist later on when Molly realizes stopping the girl won’t be enough, the signal can propagate itself through technology,” Braga adds. “The stakes keep getting heightened, and she realizes that before long, the entire city of Miami might be infected unless they take really drastic action.”
Some members of the team, most notably nightclubbing linguist Arthur Ramsay (played by the delightfully droll Peter Dinklage) try to fit in a little recreation as well. “When they’re down in Miami, Ramsay tries to take Lucas [Pegg, a shy, engaged scientist played by Rob Benedict] out to a nightclub, tells him to think of it as his bachelor party.”
Aliens, nightclubs and bachelor parties in Miami. What other drama on television offers all that?
“Swing Time,” 7 p.m. Saturday, TCM: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers float through this dance classic, a frothy confection of boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl intrigue and simply gorgeous, elegant hoofing.
American League Championship Playoffs, 7 p.m. Friday, 6:30 p.m. Saturday and 6:30 p.m. Sunday on WFLD-Ch. 32: Living under a rock? Emerging from a coma? Then, you’ll need this reminder that there are baseball games scheduled this weekend between erstwhile cherubs and that South Side team named for bleached men’s hosiery.
“Inside the Actors Studio,” 7 p.m. Sunday on Bravo: OK, OK, Sir Elton John hardly qualifies as an actor, let alone a practitioner of the Method. And host James Lipton can be one of the more infuriatingly self-aggrandizing interviewers on the air. But he sticks to his mission to discuss craft, not gossip, and John is an unusually blunt, funny interviewee well worth watching.
“Mediums,” 7 p.m. Friday on A&E: With NBC’s “Medium” and CBS’ “The Ghost Whisperer” communing, week after week, with the dead, this documentary about real-life psychics makes a kind of sense.
Allison DuBois, who inspired Patricia Arquette’s character on the fictional “Medium,” is among the subjects profiled.
More Top Picks Pressure Washers
“Hitler’s Managers,” 6 p.m. Saturday on the History Channel: This cable outlet has been conversationally derided as the Hitler Channel, thanks to its fondness for documentaries about the Nazis.
Here’s yet another. Still, the channel always offers a pleasing mix of scholarship and middle-brow entertainment, and this five-part series explores the powers behind Hitler’s rise, including arms supplier Alfred Krupp and engineer Ferdinand Porsche.