What’s on TV This Week: ‘Resistance’ and ‘Finding Your Roots’

Between neighborhood, cable and streaming, the trendy television panorama is a huge one. Here are merely diversified of the reveals, specials and movement footage coming to TV this week, Jan. 11-Jan. 17. Details and events are matter to fluctuate.

Monday

ALL AMERICAN STORIES eight p.m. on the CW. 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The categorical is contained contained all by the low worth of up into two hourlong elements (the second airs Feb. 1).

Tuesday

FINDING YOUR ROOTS eight p.m. on PBS (try native listings). The ancestral roots of the printed journalist Norah O’Donnell, the model designer Zac Posen and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will virtually truly be excavated all by the Season 6 finale of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s long-running familial historic earlier current. Highlights embrace a sequence by which Pelosi pores over the passenger manifest of a ship that arrived in New York in 1912 carrying her grandfather, her grandmother and their youngsters, along with Pelosi’s mother. “I take great pride in the courage that they had to come to America,” Pelosi says, “and to take a chance on America.”

Wednesday

CALL YOUR MOTHER 9:30 p.m. on ABC. Kyra Sedgwick stars as a mother who shoehorns her methodology into the lives of her young-adult youngsters on this new sitcom from Kari Lizer (“The New Adventures of Old Christine”). The assortment has been described by ABC as a “coming of middle-age comedy.”

FIRST REFORMED (2017) 7 p.m. on Showtime 2. Paul Schrader’s knack for steady-building dread, as shortly as used to gasoline his “Taxi Driver” screenplay, is put on potent present contained all by the one methodology all by which extra newest “First Reformed,” which Schrader every wrote and directed. Ethan Hawke stars as Rev. Ernst Toller, a worn Protestant minister at a small earlier church in upstate New York. The movie follows Toller as he turns into extra and extra agonized — by his failing appropriately being, by a present megachurch shut by and, lastly, by a tragedy. He moreover develops a closeness with a youthful native, Mary (Amanda Seyfried), who turns into most undoubtedly the least bleak presence in his life (though the bar is low). “It is the portrait of a soul in torment,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times, “all the more powerful for being so rigorously conceived and meticulously executed.”

GREAT PERFORMANCES: THE MAGIC OF CALLAS 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The classic 1953 recording of Puccini’s “Tosca” with Maria Callas was a hit when it was released and has often been spoken of as being among the greatest opera performances ever committed to tape. (The Times’s chief classical music critic, Anthony Tommasini, wrote in 2017 that “it’s hard to think of a recording of any opera that nails a work so stunningly, that seems so definitive.”) So when, a little over a decade after that recording was released, Callas returned to that opera’s title role, she had big shoes to fill: her own. Her career was also in need of a comeback. That period is the focus of this latest entry in PBS’s “Great Performances” series, which focuses on Callas’s late-career 1964 performances of “Tosca” at the Royal Opera House, in London, while also reappraising her life at large.

RESISTANCE (2020) 8 p.m. on Showtime. In this biographical drama, set in Nazi-occupied France, Jesse Eisenberg counters Nazi oppression with wit. “Resistance” casts Eisenberg as the French actor and mime Marcel Marceau. It follows Marceau’s efforts to help Jewish orphans survive Nazi-occupied France, and his work for the French resistance. (The story is based on a young Marceau’s real life.) Juggling the work of a jester and a rebel is a challenge for Marceau, and for the film itself. This is a movie that douses its audience “alternately in treacle and ice water,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for The Times. “The problem,” she added, “is that Marceau’s whimsical attempts to entertain the children dilute the growing atmosphere of menace on which the story depends.”

WIDOWS (2018) 10:30 p.m. on FX. The director Steve McQueen and the actress Viola Davis each released acclaimed projects at the end of 2020: McQueen with his film anthology “Small Axe,” and Davis with her performance as the blues singer Ma Rainey in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” A couple of years earlier, they worked together on “Widows,” a downbeat heist movie directed by McQueen. Davis stars as Veronica, a woman who works for the Chicago Teachers Union. She’s also the wife of a bank robber (Liam Neeson) who dies during a botched theft. Veronica picks up the mantle from him, with the help of three other women (Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo). The resulting movie, A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times, “is a fascinating and sometimes frustrating hybrid, a film that tries both to transcend and to exploit its genre.”