Year: 2021

1) Olympics. NBC expects big ratings tonight (8 p.m. ET and beyond), with finals in four swimming events and in the individual, all-around portion of women’s gymnastics – a field hampered Tuesday by an injury to Simone Biles (shown here). The swimming is live, the gymnastics isn’t; you can see it live from 6-11 a.m. ET on Peacock. This afternoon (noon to 5 p.m.), NBC has U.S. teams in men’s water polo (Italy) and women’s volleyball (Turkey). At night, CNBC has men’s volleyball and women’s beach volleyball, both live; USA and NBC have early heats in track. Read more…

1) “MasterChef,” 8 and 9 p.m., Fox; also, 9 p.m. Thursday. If you haven’t been watching this likable show, here’s the perfect time to catch up. Fox reruns the three episodes that chose the 15 contestants. None are professional cooks – there’s a bartender, a construction worker (shown here) and more – so Gordon Ramsay is on his best behavior, always with another famous chef to help. It’s Emeril Lagasse (shown here, right) at 8 p.m. and Curtis Stone at 9, with Paula Deen on Thursday. Read more…

1) “American Masters,” 9 p.m., PBS. Growing up on a sharecropping farm in Louisiana, Buddy Guy (shown here) had one goal: Go to Chicago to hear Muddy Waters and other blues greats. He got there and was signed by record companies … which tried to change his wailing-guitar style. He was still driving a tow truck in his early 30s. Then Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Mick Jagger and others started emulating him. In this terrific documentary, Guy, 84, visits home and reflects on a style that shaped modern rock guitarists. Read more…

1) “Roswell, New Mexico” season-opener, 8 p.m., CW, rerunning Thursday. Sure, this might seem like a silly, sci-fi soap opera. We follow pretty people (three of them descended from outer-space aliens) and a couple others resurrected from the dead. But this is from Amblin, the Steven Spielberg company that made “Resident Alien” a gem; it’s well-cast and sharply filmed. Tonight, the three sorta-siblings eye an eerie lookalike. And in Los Angeles, Liz (shown here), a brilliant scientist, nears a breakthrough and a crisis. Read more…

1) Olympics, NBC. Women’s gymnastics is back, with Simone Biles (shown here) and other favorites. The team event will be shown early evening (7-9:30 p.m.), then concludes Tuesday. In the afternoon (12:15-6 p.m.), NBC plans to show swimming, surfing and diving, plus a men’s basketball game with the U.S. and France and the finals for men’s street skateboarding. Later at night (9:30-11:30 p.m.), it has swimming and skateboarding. There’s much more on cable and on the Peacock streaming service. Read more…

1) “Eden: Untamed Planet” debut, 8-9:30 p.m., BBC America. There are still Eden-like places, where nature thrives. This series will visit one a week, starting with Borneo (shown here)… which is merely a semi-Eden; agriculture has left orangutans short of land and potential mates. Still, there are amazing creatures here, from 30-foot pythons to hawks that snag up to 10 bats in a night. And this may be your only chance to hear Helena Bonham-Carter say “the excrement falls like rain” … which the footage amply illustrates. Read more…

1) Olympics opening ceremony, NBC. If you want to be one of the first to see this, you’ll need some effort: NBC plans to show it live, from 6:55 to 11 a.m. ET. Or you can catch it in the usual way – slightly edited, but seeming live – from 7:30 p.m. to midnight ET. Either way, you’ll see lots of flash (the 2016 ceremony is shown here), with no in-person spectators, but plenty of athletes. There are more than 11,000 of them from 206 countries – ranging from 600-plus Americans to one each from Nairu, Tuvalu, Aruba and South Sudan. Read more…