NBC, 9:00 p.m. ET
I watched chunks of last night’s Top 8 performance evening – but the overly produced staging of some of the numbers, a sort of X Factor overkill, turned me off, so I did the same to my TV set. Oh, well, at least I can catch up on what I missed by watching tonight’s overextended results show.
PBS, 9:00 p.m. ET
SERIES FINALE: In “Built to Last,” host Peter Sagal examines the longevity of the U.S. Constitution by exploring how difficult it is to amend it, and how resilient it is in the face of extreme challenges to it. For this final episode in his painlessly informative documentary series, Sagal visits both Iceland, where that country’s leaders recently used the U.S. Constitution as a model to rewrite their own, and the history of Watergate. Only one of those locations, though, can be reached directly by motorcycle. Check local listings.
OWN, 9:00 p.m. ET
SERIES PREMIERE: At 8 p.m. ET, Oprah Winfrey repeats her recent edition of Oprah’s Next Chapter, with guest Tyler Perry, in which she asks the prolific and popular film and TV hyphenate what he plans to do next. Then, an hour later, Winfrey presents what he plans to do next: produce his own new TV drama series, made for Winfrey’s OWN network. Tyler Perry’s The Haves and the Have Nots is a new prime-time soap, and it’s the first scripted series made for and presented by OWN. The second one, Love Thy Neighbor, premieres tomorrow night – and it, too, is created by Tyler Perry. In tonight’s Haves and the Have Nots, the big recognizable name is John Schneider, long ago of The Dukes of Hazzard, playing a very flawed patriarch with a taste for, among other things, prostitutes. One of them, played by Tika Sumpter, is a friend of his daughter, and sees an instant opportunity for blackmail. (No racial subtext intended.)
CBS, 10:00 p.m. ET
SERIES PREMIERE: This new six-part series takes the basic approach of ABC’s medical 24/7 documentary series and applies it to local politics. Politics, by definition, is much more controversial, so this series arrives on CBS already surrounded by a legal challenge brought by a rival candidate for the office of Brooklyn district attorney, who sought to block the telecast of this series. But the way things work, that should just add to the viewership, not subtract from it.
TCM, 10:00 p.m. ET
Steve McQueen stars in this 1968 detective movie set in San Francisco, where the hills are alive with the sound of screeching. Screeching tires, specifically, as McQueen takes the wheel for one of the most famous car chase sequences in the history of cinema. And sometimes, there’s no screeching at all, because all four tires of McQueen’s green Mustang are off the ground.