1) “Saturday Night Live,” 11:29 p.m., NBC. Most teenagers don’t have a weekend quite like this: On Friday, Olivia Rodrigo (shown here) had the second-season opener of “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series,” on Disney+; today is her “SNL” debut, with Keegan-Michael Key hosting. Six days later, her album will debut. Rodrigo, 18, starred for three seasons in “Bizaardvark,” before playing Nini in the Disney+ series. Her first single, “Drivers License,” was No. 1 in the U.S. and seven other countries.
2) “Race For the Vaccine,” 9-11 p.m., CNN. Sanjay Gupta’s richly detailed film is filled with unlikely heroes. We meet Pfizer research chief Kathrin Janzen, who was smuggled out of East Germany at age 2. And Moderna’s Kizzmekia Corbett, a Black woman in what was a white-man’s field. And George Gao, who grew up in rural China and became that country’s CDC chief, quickly sending COVID details around the world. Soon, 80 groups were racing to develop a vaccine in record time.
3) “China: Nature’s Animal Kingdom” opener, 8 p.m., BBC America. This has become a splendid tradition for BBC America: Each Saturday has a marathon of gorgeous nature reruns, plus one new hour at 8. For the next three weeks, the new hours visit 10 Chinese national parks. The opener is in the Tibetan plateau, starting and ending with a fox guiding her young ones. This also has stunning footage of a 120-man, mountain-top monastery … and of the brown bear that visits it each night.
4) “The Personal History of David Copperfield” (2019), 8 p.m., HBO. Armando Iannucci has already given HBO two comedy series, the Emmy-winning “Veep” and Hugh Laurie’s “Avenue 5.” Now he’s written this movie, with a comic take on the Dickens tale. Dev Patel stars, with Laurie as Mr. Dick.
5) “American Idol,” 9-11 p.m., ABC. On Sunday, the season’s second-to-last episode will have the final five contestants each do three songs. First, here’s a rerun of the episode that got them there. Each singer does both a Mother’s Day song and something from the Coldplay songlist.