Apple TV+, 3:00 a.m. ET
DOCUMENTARY PREMIERE: Bryce Dallas Howard makes her directorial debut here as a movie director – though she’s already directed an episode of a Disney+ project, The Mandalorian. This nonfiction film, scheduled to arrive just before Father’s Day, looks at “everyday” dads, at celebrity dads – and at the multi-generational dads in the family of famous TV Happy Days son Ron Howard. Who just happens, of course, to be Bryce’s dad.
Netflix, 3:00 a.m. ET
SEASON PREMIERE: Bette Midler and Judith Light have prominent roles in this second season of what was Ryan Murphy’s first series for Netflix. But then as now, as with his Hollywood series, Murphy’s Achilles heel is exposed by the Netflix pattern of series release. Netflix drops entire seasons at once, and Murphy, from Nip/Tuck to every edition of American Horror Story, is much better at starting a story than finishing it.
ABC, 8:00 p.m. ET
NEWS SPECIAL: Juneteenth, the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States, has been around officially for almost as long as the mid-1860s, and officially became a state holiday in Texas in 1980, when the last slaves were freed there on June 19, 1865. But as just one more measure of how this particular era of racial awareness and reevaluation has blossomed and persisted, this ABC Juneteenth special is, so far as I can recall, the first broadcast network news special ever produced about this date and event.
HBO, 10:00 p.m. ET
Tonight’s socially distanced program features one of the strongest and smartest lineups Bill Maher has ever presented: Susan Rice, Malcolm Nance, George Will, and Andrew Sullivan. And what a week to have them…
IFC, 10:00 p.m. ET
The IFC series Sherman’s Showcase, a time-warp comedy parody of a “vintage” African-American TV variety show from the early 1970s, showed how irreverent, and very funny, it could be in its first season. Season 2 doesn’t arrive with weekly installments for a while – but as a treat, the series presents this special one-shot Black History Month Spectacular program, featuring such wildly imaginative segments as a panel show about bad blood between bad blood vampires – with Blade arguing with Blacula and Queen Akasha. And the really amazing thing about this Sherman’s Showcase special: it was intentionally scheduled, months ago, to premiere on Juneteenth, long before that holiday percolated to a wider – or at least whiter – level of pop culture consciousness.
HBO, 1:20 a.m. ET
Ivy Meeropol, the granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, directs this documentary about Roy Cohn, who, as a young man, was partly responsible for that couple being wrongly convicted of espionage and executed. It starts with them, then shifts to Cohn, who’s shown wielding his influence and venom at first the Rosenbergs, then at Joe McCarthy’s side railing against accused Communists, before becoming an aggressive legal force whose clients included Studio 54, various mob bosses, and Donald Trump. And one note about the documentary’s title: It’s a direct quote from Cohn’s square in the famous AIDS quilt, claiming him as a victim of the disease even as he spent much of his life hiding his sexual identity.