Holiday TV picks for moms and dads who can hardly wait for school to start again

With Christmas landing and the new year traveling faster than a speeding bullet, television can be a soothing influence on parents who have too much to do and kids who have too little.

The networks have not forgotten, and FXX offers its Plus+Size Holiday Marathon featuring 661 episodes of “The Simpsons” and running all the way through New Year’s Eve. This will set the record for the longest TV marathon in history (if anybody’s counting).

On Thursday, IFC will unroll “Christmas with the Kranks,” another holiday comedy starring Tim Allen along with Jamie Lee Curtis as his skeptical wife. The film is based surprisingly on a John Grisham novel, “Forgetting Christmas,” with a screenplay by Chris Columbus, who wrote “The Goonies” and “Young Sherlock Holmes” and directed the massively popular “Home Alone.”

We can once again count on the good ol’ Syfy to unpack its haunting “Twilight Zone” suitcase beginning New Year’s Eve and running all the way to 4 a.m. Jan. 2. Creator Rod Serling, who wrote 92 of the 156 episodes, proved to be the visionary TV writer who set the bar for many others to follow.

NBC will swing down home to Tennessee Friday with “Dolly Parton’s Christmas of Many Colors: Circle of Love,” the next chapter in the biopic about Dolly’s colorful life.

In this sequel to “Christmas of Many Colors,” Alyvia Alyn Lind stars as the young Dolly with Jennifer Nettles as her mom and Rick Schroder as her pa. Some interesting casting finds Dolly’s real-life sister, Stella, in the role of the owner of the town market, while Farrah Mackenzie plays Stella. Dolly herself appears as a prostitute, known as the “Painted Lady.”

On New Year’s Day, the “Brady Bunch” gang returns to the home they renovated — the house that was a stand-in for the Bradys when the show aired back in the late ’60s/early ’70s.

Five of them will take part on the HGTV special, including Barry Williams, Maureen McCormick, Eve Plumb, Mike Lookinland and Susan Olsen — bright and early at 7 a.m. They’ll take a refreshed look at the series, “A Very Brady Renovation,” and catch up with added memories and backstage gossip.

Intrepid Canadian police detective William Murdoch will be back on the case when Acorn TV premieres the 13th season of “Murdoch Mysteries.” Streaming begins on Christmas Day. Starring Yannick Bisson as the laconic copper, the series takes place in Toronto, where Murdoch is often faced with unrelated occurrences that twist into brain-busting puzzles.

The show is set at the turn of the century, when inroads in forensics, medical procedures and crime scene analyses are being discovered. The first two episodes will stream Christmas Day, with Episode 3 unfolding next Monday. Starting Jan. 6, the series streams weekly on Mondays.

Think Henry VIII partook of a fabulous noel? Forsooth, you better believe it, and historian Lucy Worsley will be hosting the bacchanal “12 Days of Tudor Christmas” to prove it.

The PBS special (with Worsley squeezed into a 16th century costume) will explore the traditions and rituals enjoyed by the royals of the time and will reveal that many of our customs — including carols and gift-giving — originated with those fun-loving Tudors. (Check local listings for air times.)

One of the most popular and longest-running holiday specials in television history is the stop-motion “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which first aired in 1964. Freeform will wind up its “25 Days of Christmas” on Wednesday with a sleigh full of goodies. “Frosty the Snowman” lands at 3:30 p.m., and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” sticks his nose in at 3:40 p.m.

Dick Clark will not be forgotten as long as ABC celebrates New Year’s Eve with its annual musical special. The show probably bears the longest title in television, “Dick Clark’s New Years Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest 2020.” Sheryl Crowe and Usher will perform, along with Ciara, Paula Abdul, Kelsea Ballerini and Blanco Brown, in the live 5½-hour celebration. Lucy Hale will hitch a ride as co-host with Seacrest this year and Post Malone will headline.

The host with the definite most, Steve Harvey, will be back orchestrating “Fox’s New Year’s Eve with Steve Harvey: Live from Times Square,” with the broadcast airing from 8 to 10 p.m. and again from 11 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. The other times zones will be tape-delayed.

Maria Menounos and Rob Gronkowski serve as co-hosts. Artists stringing along with Harvey include LL Cool J featuring DJ Z-Trip and the Village People celebrating their “YMCA” anthem, Sting, Robin Thicke, Florence+the Machine and Jason Aldean. Guest appearances include comedian Ken Jeong, “Saturday Night Live’s Kenan Thompson and gridiron greats Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long and Michael Strahan.