We can’t be the only ones who've noticed that all of our favorite shows are in repeats till 2010. Which, clearly, isn’t that far away and all, but we still can’t help but feel like there is some sort of network conspiracy against those of us with zero holiday plans. Which brings us to a brand new show that debuts tonight, The Sing-Off.  Apparently, the Peacock network looked around at Fox’s American Idol and Glee successes, and came up with this one, billed as “The Ultimate A Cappella Competition.” Which is…well…wow. This will be happening over the next three nights with a finale on Dec. 21. Contestants include the MA-based Beelzebubs (you know you’re cool if you’re named after a John Milton poem) who will be performing “Right Round.”  Have we mentioned that Ben Folds and Boys II Men’s Shawn Stockman are judges and Nick Lachey is the host? Are we having a stroke? Oh, and in case there was any doubt, we’re totally watching this. [NBC, 8 p.m.]

Tuesday: A Charlie Brown Christmas

Oh, it just wouldn’t be Christmastime without a little Charlie Brown Christmas! This special has aired on television every year since it premiered in 1965. Don’t you love how Charlie Brown gets depressed over the holidays? Since we’re assuming everyone has seen this at least a dozen times, here are some fun facts: this was the first primetime special made from Peanuts; the guy who produced and directed it, Bill Meléndez, also is the voice of Snoopy; Peter Robbins, who is the voice of Charlie Brown, was 9 years old when he recorded this film, and now works in real estate. So while it’s no It’s The Great Pumpkin or anything, we dare you to find anything better to watch tonight. [ABC, 8 p.m.]

Wednesday: The New World

Terrence Malick does not make a lot of movies. But you know what? When he does, you should really watch them.  The New World, from 2005, is crazy long (150 minutes) but also sort of insanely beautiful. And if you get can past the whole what-the-hell-is-happening-and-is-this-how-history-goes moments, and Colin Farrell totally looking like Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall, then you will most likely find yourself incredibly moved. Oh, and Christian Bale (so angry!) is the other man vying for Pocahontas’ affection! [IFC, 5:35 p.m.]

Thursday: The Deer Hunter

Speaking of long, beautiful, and ultimately emotionally harrowing movies, settle in with all 182 minutes of 1978’s The Deer Hunter. What is there really to say about this classic, except that it quite rightly won five Academy Awards including Best Picture. Oh, and everyone is awesome in it including Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Cazale and Meryl Streep (the real life fiancée of John Cazale who was dying from bone cancer at the time of shooting, and passed away before the film was finished). Here are more facts: director Michael Cimino has said that Robert De Niro requested a real bullet for the famed Russian Roulette scene (oh, you wacky method actors!); Christopher Walken lived on only bananas, water, and rice before filming the third act; and John Cazale only was able to make five movies in his short life, but all of them were nominated for Best Pictures (Godfather 1 and II, The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon, and, of course, The Deer Hunter). [IFC, 9 a.m.]

Friday: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

When cinema history takes a look back at 2007, and they should –- this is the year where just about every movie that came out between September and December was amazing --  we think our peeps from the future will wonder why more of a fuss wasn’t made over the fantastic Assassination of Jesse James. Sure, the title is long and so is the running time (160 minutes), but you’ll have a hard time finding a finer, more beautiful film to watch tonight. Plus, the cast includes Sam Rockwell, Casey Affleck, The Hurt Locker’s Jeremy Renner, The Road’s Garrett Dillahunt, Bright Star’s Paul Schneider,  and some up-and-comer name Brad Pitt. Watch this movie! [HBO, 3 p.m.]

And that’s what David Michaelis does in Schulz and Peanuts. Charles Schulz, who drew Peanuts for more than 50 years, turns out to be a fascinating, demented mass of contradictions. He wasn’t just a grandfatherly, kindly, smiley person who wore expensive checkerboard sweaters on Charlie Rose—although he was that. He was also a brilliant self-hating near-genius who was consumed with the desire to be in everyone’s consciousness simultaneously. “I’m torn,” he said, “between being the best artistically and being the Number One strip commercially.”

Even after he had made a huge fortune by using his characters to promote Ford Falcons, Brownie Cameras, sheets, towels, lunchboxes and plush toys, he craved wider coverage. During the Vietnam War, he gave the military permission to use Snoopy on sidewinder missiles. He was intensely jealous of any cartoonist who syndication numbers began to rival his own—Garfield’s Jim Davis, for example. He needed all of humanity to be sitting there with him at the drawing board every day, musing over the adventures of Snoopy and his group of tiny-bodied children with big round heads. He was willing to draw these same minimalist, round-headed people thousands of times—tens of thousands of times—decade after decade. If he didn’t draw them, he once said, he would be dead. He was more than a little crazy.

As Mr. Michaelis’ biography brilliantly shows, Schulz sometimes used Peanuts to allegorize and make sense of his secret life. After an affair in his 50’s with a woman of 25, Schulz had Snoopy say, “Can a person really be in love with two different snowflakes at the same time?” Schulz’s wife, Joyce, was, by many accounts, a difficult woman—belittling and bossy in ways that resembled Lucy in the comic strip. She built an ice arena, and managed the Peanuts Visitor’s Center. She and Schulz squabbled a lot.

The affair happened this way: One day a young businesswoman named Tracey came to visit. Tracey was flirtatiously admiring of the crew-cutted, professorial Schulz, and Schulz was very taken with her gold-green eyes and her perfect little nose. They skated together and had a snack at the Warm Puppy, the restaurant at the Peanuts ice rink, and eventually they had an affair. Schulz was a “red-blooded American man,” she said later. He wrote her letters extolling the greenness of her eyes and the perfect shape of her nose. But he didn’t leave Joyce.

Eventually Tracey got tired of waiting. She had other suitors. Schulz wrote her more letters about her eyes and her nose, but Tracey, by then, knew that Schulz wasn’t the people-loving Will Rogers she had thought he was—that he was in fact massively egocentric and impossible to make happy and that she really couldn’t spend her life with him. He proposed to her as they sat in a restaurant by the water. She didn’t answer. His eye flitted to a large sailboat sliding by, and he said, “If you married me, you could have anything you want. I make four thousand dollars a day.” Her heart fell, and that was the end of the affair.

It might seem as if this sort of thing would diminish Schulz—but oddly enough, it doesn’t. After reading Mr. Michaelis’ rich, appreciative, closely researched biography, your brain makes room again for the remembered greatness of Snoopy, hero of childhood, dancing in the floating, nose-up, chin-stretched way he danced, and for the kind voice of Peppermint Patty in the TV shows, and for Linus’ disorderly hair curving around his ear. Everything that was good in Schulz went into what he drew, and what he drew was worth the daily devotion he lavished on it. As a draftsman he did not have the artistry of Don Martin, Dr. Seuss or Rowland Emett, but he was able to chisel his own personality into fragments and turn those fragments into characters that become our life companions. And that’s very difficult to do.

A reporter for The New York Times called up Schulz’s ex-wife Joyce recently to ask her what she thought of the biography. “I’m not talking to anybody about anything,” she said. Which is a line you can almost see in bold capitals coming from a loud, irritable Lucy in the last panel of one of Schulz’s strips from the 1970’s.

Nicholson Baker is the author of seven novels; with Margaret Brentano he wrote The World on Sunday: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer’s Newspaper (1898-1911).