Tuning in: On TV this week.
Sunday April 17
Arrested Development: Righteous Brothers (Fox, 8:30-9 p.m.): If you've tried to tune in and found the story impossible to follow, the season finale makes clearer than most episodes how each member of this hilariously dysfunctional family relates to the others. All the choices these characters make are not only selfish, they are self-defeating. The show charms because it mocks narcissism in its characters - without quite despising them.
Mystery! Miss Marple (PBS, check local listings; Part 2 follows April 24): She's back, but my, how she's changed. Geraldine McEwan's impish amateur sleuth has a romantic private history, making her warmer than her predecessors, especially the philosophical Joan Hickson. In the first episode, she must deduce who killed a nasty retired colonel when almost everyone wanted to. The dark ending may leave viewers feeling weirder than usual.
James Patterson's 'Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas' (CBS, 9 -11 p.m.): When a young editor falls in love with her client-writer, the mysterious young man leaves her, first asking her to read the diary of his wife. Christina Applegate stars in this remarkably well-acted tear-jerker - a tragedy with a happy ending.
FDR - A Presidency Revealed (History Channel, 9 -11 p.m.; Part 2 follows April 18): Perhaps the most lively, balanced biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt ever made, this exceptional documentary pulls up rare footage and photographs, and rarer oral histories to reveal the man who brought the United States out of the Great Depression while conducting the war of the century and struggling with his own frail health. His failures seem as spectacular as his successes when we hear from dissenting historians.
