TBS, 5:00 p.m. ET
Part of the storyline to today’s sudden-death wild card game, no matter which team emerges as the victor, will be a salute to Braves legend Chipper Jones, because it could be his last game. But the game itself will have drama enough – under rules newly instituted this year, each league opens the post-season proceedings to a wild-card playoff, and these two National League teams have qualified. Barely.
TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET
This new TCM documentary is written directed and produced by Laurent Bouzereau, who does a masterful job assembling pertinent film clips and dividing them into various sub-genres, from satiric and historic to romantic and paranoid. He also assembles various artists for personal perspective – an odd and incomplete lot, but the best of them include Rob Reiner and a surprisingly vulnerable Oliver Stone. Hollywood Goes to Washington will make you want to seek out about a dozen great old political movies, and TCM makes it easy by presenting one of the first, and one of the best, at 9 p.m. ET: 1939’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
TBS, 8:30 p.m. ET
This is the American League wild-card sudden-death playoff game, a do-or-die affair that has the Rangers, after being swept by the improbably resurgent Oakland Athletics, battling to earn a spot in postseason play by facing the Baltimore Orioles.
Fox, 9:00 p.m. ET
The Season 5 reboot of this series, launching it decades into a dystopian future, has worked wonders so far, making it even more sinister and foreboding and fascinating than before. The most exciting change is the addition of Etta (Georgina Haig), the grown daughter of Peter and Olivia, who in 2036 has helped her revived-from-suspended-animation parents find one another and rescue their key cohort Walter. But his memories and plans, crucial to saving the future, seem to be destroyed. But are they? This week, we learn more about that – and about Etta.
HBO, 10:00 p.m. ET
The Friday after the first 2012 presidential debate, Bill Maher holds court with, among others, influential pollster and political advisor Frank Luntz, author Bill McKibben, and Mark Foley.