BEST BETS FOR APRIL 04, 2008

	JOHN ADAMS HBO, 5:45 p.m. ET Episode five of this fabulous miniseries is televised Sunday night – but if you’ve missed some or all of the previous episodes, settle down (or set your VCR or DVR) and enjoy. Tonight, beginning at 5:45 p.m. ET, HBO presents all four of the episodes thus far, from John Adams’ attention-getting court case in 1770 to the birth of a new nation. Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney star, with help from such crafty supporting actors as Tom Wilkinson, portraying Ben Franklin.
	CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND IFC, 6:45 p.m. ET No question about it: This 2002 film is a strange movie, based on the strange “autobiography” of a very strange man. The man is Chuck Barris, the bad-boy host of The Gong Show (as a tacky TV purveyor, he was, sadly, decades ahead of his time). In his book about himself, he claimed to be a secret hit man, and this black comedy accepts that bizarre version and runs with it. And runs with quite a cast: Sam Rockwell plays Barris, and gets support from, among others, George Clooney, Drew Barrymore and Julia Roberts.
	IRMA LA DOUCE TCM, 8 p.m. ET Speaking of Julia Roberts, if she could play a streetwalker and still come off as some sort of childlike innocent and get away with it in Pretty Woman, she wasn’t the first actress to pull off that trick. Among her predecessors: Shirley MacLaine, playing a pavement-pounding prostitute – a French one, no less – who’s never far from the long arm of the law, a gendarme played by Jack Lemmon. Billy Wilder directed this fairly freewheeling, though now somewhat quaint, 1963 comedy.
	BIG TV Land, 10 p.m. ET What’s the Big deal? Twenty years have based since Tom Hanks turned this kid-in-adult’s-body fantasy into something special, and it’s still an impressive, addictive performance to watch. From playing the floor piano as a dance duet with Robert Loggia, to eating baby corn from a buffet table and hilariously holding his own in a toy company meeting about new product, Hanks proved he was a wonderful actor – before many people were even remotely thinking of him that way.
	BATTLESTAR GALACTICA Sci Fi Channel, 10 p.m. ET The fourth and final season begins with the unexpected – Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) returns to the fleet, alive and claiming to have found the planet called Earth. And it doesn’t stop there. For more, see today’s BIANCULLI’S BLOG.
	REAL LIFE WITH BILL MAHER HBO, 11 p.m. ET Among tonight’s guests: Pennsylvania Republican Senator Arlen Specter, scheduled to speak to Maher by satellite. With the Pennsylvania primary looming so large for the Democrats, Maher’s questions to Specter – and his answers – should be considered must-see viewing for political junkies.