Cable News Network has the scoop on...

Cable News Network has the scoop on Time magazine’s “Man of the Year.” Before the issue hits the newsstands sometime after Christmas, CNN viewers will be treated to an advance half-hour profile of the winner, hosted by Mark Walton, at 6 p.m. Saturday.

Three-time Grammy winner Natalie Cole will host and perform in CBS’ annual New Year’s celebration, “Happy New Year, America 1990.” The musical countdown to the New Year will be broadcast from the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York on Dec. 30 beginning at 11:30 p.m.

Harry Belafonte, Claudette Colbert, Alexandra Danilova, Mary Martin and William Schuman have been chosen by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington as recipients of the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors. The black-tie gala ceremony will be shown Dec. 29 on CBS.

Terrorism, earthquakes, Wall Street crashes, the AIDS epidemic, drugs, gangs, global warming. See it all when NBC presents “The Eighties,” an end-of-the-decade portrait of the 1980s hosted by Tom Brokaw and Jane Pauley airing Dec. 27.

Monty Python’s Michael Palin is going “Around the World in 80 Days” in an Arts & Entertainment seven-week series beginning Jan. 7. Unlike the motion picture and recent TV miniseries, the series will chronicle Palin’s real-life attempt to circle the globe in Jules Verne’s allotted time.

Documentary film maker Frederick Wiseman spent six weeks studying people approaching death in the medical intensive care unit of a Boston hospital. The result is “Near Death,” a six-hour documentary airing Jan. 21 on KCET.

“Frontline,” the PBS series that presents hard-hitting public affairs documentaries, will expand the length of its season beginning next year. An October-through-May season will be tacked on after the end of the regular season, which begins Jan. 23 and runs through June.

Kris Kristofferson and Rip Torn are Texas Rangers who team up with Willie Nelson as a professional safecracker to track down a maniacal killer of high-school girls in the upcoming “RIP.” The CBS movie recently completed production in Austin, Tex.