Michael Hayes
9pm, FX289
This series ran from 1997 to 1998 - it's what David Caruso did between NYPD Blue and CSI Miami when his movie career took dodo-like flight. He stars as a homicide detective turned US attorney office prosecutor, who can't quite give up his old sleuthing habits. Here, he reinvestigates a nine-year-old murder at the risk of jeopardising an immunity deal for a mafia hitman. As the tough but tender loner, the role's a bit too well-tailored for Caruso but it's satisfactory, if undemanding, viewing for those with a taste for NYPD-style smouldering, anti-criminal righteousness.
David Stubbs
Jonathan Miller's Brief History of Disbelief
9.30pm, BBC4
Jonathan Miller's new series is a history of atheism. It is rigorously old-school stuff - Miller makes it clear in his opening monologue that he's as sceptical of modern documentary techniques as he is of God, and promises a total lack of computer animations and dramatic reconstructions. Instead, Miller proceeds on the novel assumption that his audience isn't comprised entirely of drooling halfwits, and explores his theme through a series of interesting and provocative conversations with clever people who've thought a bit about things. A crazy idea, but it works.
Andrew Mueller
Films
Riding in Cars With Boys
(Penny Marshall, 2001)
8pm, FilmFour
An uneven but absorbing drama based on Beverly Donofrio's account of becoming a teenage mum in 1960s Connecticut and then struggling to get into college and become a writer. A little dour, but Drew Barrymore gives a painfully honest performance as Beverly: she is both admirably dogged in pursuing her ambitions, and a pretty useless mother. Steve Zahn is excellent, too, as as her hopeless, alcoholic husband, and it's all rather more emotionally complex than your average Hollywood fare.
Reds
(Warren Beatty, 1981)
8pm, Sky Cinema 1
As an epic romance set against the Russian revolution, it has the giant sweep of Dr Zhivago, but it's Beatty's film - he produced, co-wrote and stars. Playing John Reed, the American red who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World, Beatty follows the socialist struggle from Greenwich Village to Moscow, and the sombre reminiscences of the likes of Henry Miller and Rebecca West add to the feel of history in the making. But the great events never overpower the stormy relationship between Reed and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton).
Me, Myself and Irene
(Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly, 2000)
9pm, ITV2
Jim Carrey is reunited with the Farrelly brothers in this typically tasteless but warm-hearted excursion into mental illness. Carrey is ever-so-nice Rhode Island motorbike cop Charlie, who has to compete with his own schizophrenic alter-ego, hateful Hank, for the love of Renée Zellweger's sweet Irene. It's a brilliant Jekyll-and-Hyde act, lurching between his Mask antics and the heftier dramatics of The Truman Show.
Paul Howlett
