BIG BLUE LIVE
PBS, 8:00 p.m. ET
Part 2 of 3. This is the central night of a three-night experiment in which cameras, reporters and scientists are dispatched around Monterey Bay to capture live TV shots of the marine wildlife gathering there at this time of year. Last night’s opener relied a bit too much on pre-packaged features, but this PBS-BBC co-production was quite lucky with some of its live photography, especially at the end, when whale watchers everywhere must have been thrilled. (BBC viewers were even luckier: Their Big Blue Live series started a day earlier, and captured the first-ever live footage of a giant blue whale, pictured.) The quest, and supposedly the good luck, continues tonight. My only hope is that, whenever a live camera image captures something exciting, the director drops the interview in progress into a smaller picture-in-picture frame, rather than relegating the valuable live nature footage to that tinier rectangle. Check local listings.