ABC, 8:00 p.m. ET
SEASON PREMIERE: We’ve already had Shark Week, thanks to Discovery Channel’s annual escapades — and now it’s time for Shark Tank Week, with Mark Cuban and other high-rolling business types competing to find, and finance, the best ideas brought to them. Including, in tonight’s opener, an enterprising way to identify a bedbug infestation before calling in the exterminators. Creepy, sure — but profitable? Quite possibly.
AMC, 8:00 p.m. ET
Here’s another
“spider-web movie” of mine — a film that I’ll recommend, and watch, almost every time it’s televised. And this Steven Spielberg one, at this point, is 35 years old, which makes both its special effects and its effectively dramatic story and characterizations that much more impressive. Richard Dreyfuss, Francois Truffaut star.
TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET
Long live the Queen! TCM presents a triple feature of costume epics about Elizabeth I tonight, and two of them star Bette Davis, in movies made decades apart. Davis in 1955’s The Virgin Queen (pictured) leads off the night, and an earlier Davis effort, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex from 1939, is shown at midnight ET. In between: the lovely Jean Simmons in 1953’s Young Bess, televised at 10 p.m. ET.
PBS, 9:00 p.m. ET
I’ve been watching this recently staged version of the Wagner Ring cycle all week, and now have a renewed appreciation for the quote, attributed to Mark Twain, that “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” But this climactic installment contains most of the fiery drama, as well as the Wagnerian anthems adopted and adapted, with very different results, in Birth of a Nation, Apocalypse Now and other films. In this finale, which translates as Twilight of the Gods, Siegfried and Brunnhilde (Jay Hunter Morris, Deborah Voight) see their love burn with a white-hot intensity — and that’s not all. Check local listings.
HBO, 10:00 p.m. ET
It’s not a politics-heavy panel this week, but it is a vocal one. Maher’s guests include, among others, John Legend and Bob Costas.