BY CLIF GARBODEN

THURSDAY 22

8:00 (2) Peter and Paul and the Christian Revolution: The Empire and the Kingdom. The conclusion. A history of the early "Jesus Movement" (as they’re now calling Christianity), focusing on Peter’s knack for organization and Paul’s talents as a publicist. (Until 9 p.m.)

9:00 (2) Frontline: Son of al-Qaeda. The tale of Abdurahman Khadr, trained terrorist turned CIA informant. As a child, Khadr hung out with the children of his father’s best friend, Osama bin Laden, so murdering minions of the Great Satan came naturally. But then things changed, and Khadr switched sides to the devil he didn’t know. To be repeated tonight at 5 a.m., and on Channel 44 at 2 and 4 a.m. (Until 11 p.m.)

FRIDAY 23

9:30 (2) The American Experience: Patriots’ Day. Repeated from last week. A film by Marian Marzynski looking at the annual re-enactment of the famous skirmish on Lexington Green as it goes behind the scenes (vérité-like) with the costumed patriot and redcoat impersonators. (Until 10:30 p.m.)

SATURDAY 24

Noon (44) Viewer Favorites. Will this vague programming tactic never end? Will there be more fundraising? (Until 11 p.m.)

3:00 (6) Hockey. Stanley Cup conference-semifinal playoff action.

8:00 (10) Space Cowboys (movie). Old-guy power! Get that Steve Miller song out of your head long enough to appreciate the peculiar nature of this non-teen exploitation film from director Clint Eastwood. Clint stars as an aging rocket scientist assigned to lasso a renegade satellite with the help of a collection of assisted-living astronauts. Co-starring Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, James Garner, and William Devane. (Until 11 p.m.)

11:00 (2) Colorvision: Rage. Five films from non-white filmmakers about getting real angry: "Snapped," which is about a New Yorker’s breakdown in a parking lot; "Dreamer," in which a Native American fantasizes a nightmare vision of the future; "The Shangri-La Café," in which a Japanese child runs smack into racism at her parents’ restaurant; "Big Head People: Vacation," which follows an African-American couple on a visit to Colonial Williamsburg for a first-hand lesson in slavery; and "Yada Yada," in which a hate-radio talk-show host confronts the real world. (Until midnight.)

Midnight (2) P.O.V.: Love and Diane. Repeated from last week. A "stereotype-shattering" film, shot over the period of a decade, about a crack addict (Diane) and her daughter (Love), who was taken into foster care back in the ’80s. Now 18, Love has her own child, and Diane is desperate to reconnect. (Until 2 a.m.)

SUNDAY 25

5:30 (44) Carol Channing and Pearl Bailey on Broadway. A landmark (of sorts) 1969 concert at the Winter Garden with the two Broadway queens collaborating on hits from familiar musicals. (Until 7 p.m.)

7:30 (2) Great Performances: Harry Connick Jr.: Only You. Only him performs ’50s and ’60s standards ("The Very Thought of You," "Crazy") from his latest album. This smells suspiciously like pledge-drive programming. (Until 9 p.m.)

9:00 (2) Masterpiece Theatre: Prime Suspect 6: The Last Witness, part two. Helen Mirren returns to her compelling portrayal of DCI Jane Tennison in this new PS series in which Jane tackles the disturbing torture murder of a Bosnian Muslim and winds up battling an Eastern European crime syndicate. The conclusion. To be repeated tonight at 4 a.m., and on Channel 44 at 1 and 4 a.m. (Until 11 p.m.)

9:00 (12) Plainsong (movie). Rachel Griffith, Marion Seldes, and Aiden Quinn star in this Hallmark Hall of Fame TV-movie about a schoolteacher whose wife runs off and leaves him with their two sons, whereupon he rebuilds his life through the power of small-town America. (Until 11 p.m.)

MONDAY 26

8:00 (6) The Sixth Sense (movie). Not that we want to give away the ending or anything, but Bruce Willis looks pretty good for a dead guy. Co-starring Haley Joel Osment and Toni Collette. (Until 11 p.m.)

8:00 (44) P.O.V.: Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin. An excellent profile of Rustin, one of the moving forces in the American civil-rights movement, who because he was gay never got near the spotlight. (Until 9:30 p.m.)

9:00 (2) The American Experience: Transcontinental Railroad. Even today, we’re invited to remember the Driving of the Golden Spike (May 10, 1869) as a landmark of American progress. And indeed, linking the US coasts by rail was a major deal that changed commerce and communications and culture in short order. The great thing about this American Experience show is that it looks behind the signature event and reminds us that the link-up at Promontory Summit, Utah, was also a testament to greed, unbridled capitalism, worker exploitation, and market manipulation. (Until 11 p.m.)

9:30 (44) Independent Lens: Ram Dass: Fierce Grace. Repeated from last week. Mickey Lemle’s 2001 film about self-made spiritual leader Richard Alpert (who first surfaced when he was dumped from Harvard with Tim Leary for messing with LSD on university time) at age 70. (Until 11 p.m.)

TUESDAY 27

8:00 (2) Nova: Infinite Secrets. A peek inside a long-lost Archimedes manuscript — subject: math. Apparently Archi wrote this some 2200 years ago, but some diligent monk, either in search of a clean sheet of paper or intent on expunging pre-Christian scholarship, erased it. Now a copy has turned up, and it’s being deciphered at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. To be repeated tonight at 5 a.m. (Until 9 p.m.)

9:00 (2) Innovation: Light Speed. Fiber optics — who understands it? Okay, perhaps not, but this speed-of-light-ish data-transfer technology has quietly been changing the communications world for some time. To be repeated tonight at 1:30 a.m. (Until 10 p.m.)

9:00 (44) The Great Campaign of 1960. Reliving the scary days when Richard Nixon first tried to be president. JFK stopped him in the end, but not exactly by a landslide. In any case, the Kennedy push to topple the GOP stronghold was an effort worth remembering. (Until 10 p.m.)

10:00 (2) Scientific American Frontiers: Games Machines Play. Host Alan Alda visits the robot-design contest at either the Massachusetts Institute of Design or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (depending on whether you believe the WGBH paper press release or the version on the Web). Wherever it’s held, this sounds as if it could be better than your basic robot-war event. (Until 11 p.m.)

10:00 (44) Independent Lens: The Weather Underground. In the late 1960s, a group of campus and off-campus radicals organized (to use the word loosely) themselves into a collective called the Weather Underground (a name often used interchangeably with the Weathermen; there was some subtle difference, now lost in the mists) and declared war on the US government. How that war was fought wasn’t exactly in keeping with the peace-and-love ethic that drove the anti–Vietnam War movement. So the jury’s still out on whether these people had a point or were just a little extreme. In any case, they wound up on the FBI’s most-wanted list, and many of them lived in hiding for decades. This film intercuts footage from back in the day, FBI data, and interviews with survivors Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, David Gilbert, and Brian Flanagan. The result is a solid picture of those terrifying times (not unlike what we can expect if Bush is elected in November). (Until 11:30 p.m.)

WEDNESDAY 28

8:00 (2) Mark Russell Comedy Special. The funniest guy in Buffalo returns to public television to prove that people in Buffalo just aren’t very funny. (Until 9 p.m.)

8:00 (10) Life’s Funniest Moments. May you have one. But these moments aren’t from your life, or the life of anyone remotely like you. They’re funniest moments caught on film during reality shows and animal-feature segments. (Until 9 p.m.)

8:00 (44) New York the Way It Was: Greenwich Village. A Village tour highlighting the hot spots of the 1940s through the 1960s. (Until 9 p.m.)

9:00 (2) American Masters: Henry Luce and Time-Life’s America: A Vision of Empire. This is promoted as a profile of Time-Life founder Luce, who established his empire in 1923 and lorded over it through the 1960s. The subtext, we assume, is that during the Luce era, those two namesake magazines had an incredible power to shape America’s self-image — and for the most part, they used it wisely. To be repeated tonight at 1 and 4 a.m. (Until 10:30 p.m.)

9:00 (44) The American Experience: Citizen King. An oddly titled bio of Dr. Martin Luther King covering the last five years of his life — i.e., from his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial to this murder in Memphis in 1968. (Until 11 p.m.)

THURSDAY 29

7:30 (2) Basic Black: Forgotten Warriors. An Emmy–winning edition covering the experience of African-American troops in the Korean War. (Until 8 p.m.)

8:00 (2) Queen Victoria’s Empire: Engines of Change. A repeat airing of a four-parter about Britain under Vicky, a situation that dragged on for 64 years. The first installment covers Victoria’s birth, her marriage to Prince Albert, the drastic social changes brought on by industrialization, and the various visions of Empire that extended England’s reach into eternal sunlight. (Until 9 p.m.)

9:00 (2) Frontline: The Jesus Factor. A new Frontline show that looks at that vacuous moron G.W. Bush and his simple-minded grasp of Christian theology. Okay, we know the guy is either stupid enough to fall for the fundamentalist evangelical nonsense or smart enough to exploit it. Either way, the question is, does he really make political decisions based on chats with his God? To be repeated tonight at 5 a.m., and on Channel 44 at 2 and 4 a.m. (Until 10 p.m.)

9:05 (10) Will & Grace. The season finale. (Until 10 p.m.)

10:00 (2) Children’s Hospital: Society. This series about Children’s Memorial in Chicago focuses on how the institution interacts with its patients’ families. (Until 11 p.m.)