THURSDAY

7:30 (2) Basic Black: The Choice. A discussion of reproductive rights (i.e., pro/anti-abortion). (Until 8 p.m.)

8:00 (2) Two Men in a Trench: Culloden. Our pair of military archæologists revisit the battlefield where the Jacobite rebellion came to a bloody end. (Until 9 p.m.)

8:00 (5) The Disco Ball. Relive those coke-drenched days of the post-Vietnam era with KC and the Sunshine Band getting down tonight and shaking their collective booty, the Pointer Sisters jumping because they’re so excited, Gloria Gaynor surviving, Roselyn Sanchez keeping her stuff hot, Taylor Dayne loving the nightlife, Mya turning the beat around, and the Village People celebrating life at the YMCA. (Until 10 p.m.)

8:00 (25) Scream (movie). Wes Craven’s 1996 self-parody stars Neve Campbell as a terrorized teen in a town beset by an over-zealous slasher-movie fan. With Courtney Cox, Drew Barrymore, and David Arquette. (Until 10 p.m.)

10:00 (2) Our Genes/Our Choices: Making Better Babies. Dateline NBC’s John Hockenberry moderates a debate on pre-natal genetic testing. (Until 11 p.m.)

Midnight (2) The American Experience: Chicago: City of the Century, parts one, two, and three. Repeated from last week. How a Midwestern swamp grew into one of the world’s most influential cities and shaped American in the 19th and 20 centuries as much as New York, Philadelphia, or Washington did. To be repeated on Saturday at 7 p.m. and 1 a.m. and on Sunday at 2:30 p.m. (Until 4:30 a.m.)

FRIDAY

8:00 (44) Coupling, " Size Matters. " We’re back to the start of some cycle with this British sex-com — we presume the beginning of the series, because Steve and Susan aren’t yet engaged. (Until 8:30 p.m.)

8:30 (44) Kiss Me Kate. Unfortunate title aside, you might give this series a chance to grow on you. It’s an unambitious work-family comedy from England starring Caroline Quentin (from Jonathan Creek) as a psychotherapist working out of her home. But second banana Charles Langham, a long-time master of droll understatement, steals the show. Relentlessly pleasant. (Until 9 p.m.)

Midnight (2) Masterpiece Theatre: Wives and Daughters, part four. Repeated from two weeks ago. Roger returns from Africa, and that’s the end. (Until 2 a.m.)

SATURDAY

1:30 (5) Basketball. Duke versus Maryland.

2:00 (4) Basketball. Notre Dame versus Kentucky, followed by Illinois versus Indiana.

7:00 (2) The American Experience: Chicago: City of the Century, parts one, two, and three. Repeated from Thursday at midnight.

4:00 (5) Figure Skating. Live US Championship skating from Dallas. This afternoon we have the men’s final, with Todd Eldredge, Timothy Goebel, and Michael Weiss. (Until 6 p.m.)

8:00 (5) Figure Skating. More live US Championship action from Dallas, this time featuring the competitive talents of Sasha Cohen, Michelle Kwan, and Sarah " America’s Sweetheart " Hughes. (Until 11 p.m.)

Midnight (2) Austin City Limits. Featuring music from Jackson Browne.

1:00 a.m. (2) The American Experience: Chicago: City of the Century, parts one, two, and three. Repeated from Thursday at midnight.

SUNDAY

Noon (5) Basketball. BC versus West Virginia.

2:30 (2) The American Experience: Chicago: City of the Century, parts one, two, and three. Repeated from Thursday at midnight.

3:00 (25) Football. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers visit the Philadelphia Eagles in the NFC championship game.

6:30 (4) Football. The Tennessee Titans visit the Oakland Raiders in the AFC championship game.

7:00 (2) Freedom: A History of Us: A Fatal Contradiction and A War To End All Slavery. Tonight, you can try to get past Katie Curic’s voice to catch this series’s take on abolitionism and the Civil War. (Until 8 p.m.)

7:00 (5) Sounder (movie). A boy and his dog take charge of the family when dad is sent to jail in the racist South. This is a 2003 remake from the novel by William Armstrong. (Until 9 p.m.)

8:00 (7) The 60th Annual Golden Globe Awards. Like we really care what the foreign press thinks. After an hour of gawking at stars walking into the building (a tradition that could end forever any time now), we get Hayek versus Kidman, DiCaprio versus Nicholson, Zellweger versus Zeta-Jones, and more. (Until 11 p.m.)

8:00 (44) Come Blow Your Horn (movie). Frank Sinatra plays a swingin’ NYC bachelor in this 1963 Bud Yorkin/Norman Lear screen adaptation of Screamin’ Neil Simon’s play about a naïf in the big city. With Tony Bill, Lee J. Cobb, and Molly Picon. (Until 9:45 p.m.)

9:00 (2) Masterpiece Theatre: The Hound of the Baskervilles. Down, boy. The Conan Doyle story that planted the haunting phrase " Grimpen Mire " in your brain at a young age comes to fog-bound life again with Moulin Rouge’s Richard Roxburgh as Sherlock Holmes tracing the link between an ancient family curse and a big bad dog. With Harry Potter’s Ian Hart as Watson. To be repeated tonight at 1 and 4 a.m. on Channel 44, and on Tuesday at 1 a.m. (Until 11 p.m.)

9:45 (44) Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (movie). Again. (Until 11:30 p.m.)

1:00 and 4:00 a.m. (44) Masterpiece Theatre: The Hound of the Baskervilles. Repeated from this evening at 9 p.m.

MONDAY

7:30 (5) The King Years: The Boston Story. No, no, not Ed King — Martin Luther King. The story of his time at BU. (Until 8 p.m.)

8:00 (5) The Rock (movie). When nutso Marine Ed Harris takes over Alcatraz, Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage volunteer to break into the island prison and disarm him before he blows up San Francisco. (Until 11 p.m.)

9:00 (2) The American Experience: The Murder of Emmett Till. A powerful revisit to the dark days of 1955, when a gang of cracker-brained mouth breathers from Mississippi murdered a 14-year-old African-American boy visiting from Chicago for whistling at a white woman. After which, of course, the killers were tried by their Jim Crow peers and set free. See our review on page 13. To be repeated tonight at 1 and 4 a.m. on Channel 44. (Until 10 p.m.)

9:00 (2) Indie Select: Heaven Touches Brooklyn in July. An examination of Italian-American culture. (Until 10 p.m.)

10:00 (2) P.O.V.: Brother Outsider: The Life of Byron Rustin. Rustin was a major player in the American civil-rights movement. He organized the 1963 " I Had a Dream " rally in Washington and influenced Dr. Martin Luther King toward non-violent resistance. For his trouble, he was beaten, jailed, and disenfranchised — largely because he was gay in a world that wasn’t. (Until 11:30 p.m.)

1:00 and 4:00 a.m. (44) The American Experience: The Murder of Emmett Till. Repeated from this evening at 9 p.m.

TUESDAY

7:30 (2) La Plaza: Conversations with Ilan Stavans: Martin Espada. A talk with the celebrated Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican poet (A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen: Poems). (Until 8 p.m.)

8:00 (2) Nova: Ancient Creature of the Deep. The fish that got away — for several millennia. The story of the once-extinct coelacanth (a/k/a Latimeria chalumnae), which may have been lurking in the depths off Indonesia since its alleged disappearance before the age of dinosaurs. To be repeated on Wednesday at midnight and 3 a.m. (Until 9 p.m.)

8:00 (44) In Search of Ancient Ireland: Heroes, Satins, and Warlords. A not-bad chronicle of real and imagined events in Ireland’s history, from Maeve and the Cattle Raid to the 1170 Norman Invasion. (Until 11 p.m.)

9:00 (2) Journey of Man. The same tool that empowered Clonaid could also disprove its assertion that we’re all the children of emissaries from the Planet Mongo. Genetic expert Dr. Spencer Wells hit all the populated continents looking for common links among races and came up with the notion that we’re all descended from a single person (married to whom?) who lived in Africa 60,000 years ago. (Until 11 p.m.)

1:00 a.m. (2) Masterpiece Theatre: The Hound of the Baskervilles. Repeated from Sunday at 9 p.m.

WEDNESDAY

7:30 (2) Beacon Hill Beat. John Carroll escapes the less-convincing clutches of Emily Rooney to host his own show, on which he rounds up the week’s activities at the Mass State House with a round table of Beacon Hill reporters. (Until 8 p.m.)

8:00 (2) National Geographic: The Quest for Noah’s Flood. If anyone can find a dried-up flood, it’s deep-water explorer Robert Ballard. (Until 9 p.m.)

8:00 (44) Live from Lincoln Center: Perlman at the Penthouse. Itzhak plays (upstairs at Lincoln Center) with students and alums from the Perlman Music Program. (Until 9 p.m.)

9:00 (2) P.O.V.: Two Towns of Jasper. Another recent highlight from the less-educated reaches of our nation was the brutal 1998 race murder of African-American James Byrd Jr. by three sons of Texas named Lawrence Russell Brewer, John William King, and Shawn Allen Berry. You remember the story: the redneck trio gave Byrd a ride home and ended up dragging his body to pieces behind Berry’s pick-up truck. This documentary, from Whitney Dow and Marco Williams, dispatched separate film crews to interview black and white residents of Jasper during the trial. What’s said is almost as shocking as the crime. The filmmakers will be interviewed on Basic Black at 10:30 tonight; on Thursday, at 9 p.m., Ted Koppel moderates a live discussion from Jasper. To be repeated tonight at 1 and 4 a.m. on Channel 44. (Until 10:30 p.m.)

9:00 (44) Joshua Bell: West Side Story Suite from Central Park. Grammy-grabbing violinist Bell and the New York Philharmonic do an outdoor tribute to Leonard Bernstein. (Until 10 p.m.)

10:00 (44) Evening at Pops: Fiddlers Three. Keith Lockhart and the Poppers back jazz-violinist Regina Carter, classical bow master Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, and Irish traditional fiddler Eileen Ivers. (Until 11 p.m.)

10:30 (2) Basic Black: A Conversation About " Two Towns of Jasper. " Marco Williams and Whitney Dow discuss the shocking film that aired tonight at 9 p.m. To be repeated on Thursday at 7:30 and 10:30 p.m. (Until 11 p.m.)

Midnight and 3:00 a.m. (2) Nova: Ancient Creature of the Deep. Repeated from Tuesday at 8 p.m.

1:00 and 4:00 a.m. (44) P.O.V.: Two Towns of Jasper. Repeated from this evening at 9 p.m.

THURSDAY

7:30 and 10:30 (2) Basic Black: A Conversation About " Two Towns of Jasper. " Repeated from Wednesday at 10:30 p.m.

8:00 (2) Two Men in A Trench: Firth of Forth. We momentarily leave Jasper, Texas, to find military archæologists Neil and Tony camped on the dreary shore of Scotland, where the locals repulsed the Danes back in 1010. Giving new meaning to the phrase " dearth of mirth on the Firth of Forth. " (Until 9 p.m.)

8:00 (25) Scream 2 (movie). Director Wes Craven’s spoof-of-sequels sequel to his Scream spoof finds Courtney Cox and Neve Campbell still alive and ready to face another random serial killer. (Until 10 p.m.)

9:00 (2) America in Black and White: Jasper, Texas. ABC’s Ted Koppel helps out PBS’s P.O.V. with this live town-hall forum from the scene of the James Byrd murder. (Until 10:30 p.m.)