BY CLIF GARBODEN

THURSDAY 13

7:30 (2) Basic Black: A Conversation with Bob Moses. MacArthur Fellow and civil-rights activist Moses discusses his career as a math teacher. (Until 8 p.m.)

9:00 (2) Frontline: Dangerous Prescriptions. A frightening look at the role drug companies play in the federal drug-approval process. To be repeated tonight at 1 a.m., and on Channel 44 at 2 and 4 a.m. (Until 10 p.m.)

10:00 (2) Frontline: The Other Drug War. The one that sick people have to wage to be able to afford their meds. To be repeated tonight at 2 a.m., and on Channel 44 at 5 a.m. (Until 11 p.m.)

FRIDAY 14

12:30 a.m. (2) Masterpiece Theatre: Doctor Zhivago, part two. Repeated from last week. The conclusion of this sad and meandering Brit-TV version of Boris Pasternak’s wider-vision novel. Worth watching only if you sat through part one and still wonder how tribal things can get. It’s amazing how (renowned) screenwriter Andrew Davies could take a work about class, politics, history, intellectualism, warfare, loyalty, romance, and culture in transition and reduce it to a sex scandal. To be repeated on Saturday at 6 p.m. and 4 a.m. and on Sunday at 5 p.m. (Until 2:30 a.m.)

SATURDAY 15

3:30 (12) Football. Auburn versus Georgia.

6:00 (2) Masterpiece Theatre: Doctor Zhivago, part two. Repeated from Friday at 12:30 a.m.

8:00 (2) The Search for Amelia Earhart. The fabled "aviatrix" has been missing for some 60 years now, but her mysterious disappearance still haunts us. This show follows an expedition to the South Pacific to unearth clues. The possibility is that she made an emergency landing on some remote isle where she became either a ritual sacrifice to a giant gorilla or a goddess who ruled her tribe with compassion and understanding. (Until 9 p.m.)

9:00 (2) Jackie: Behind the Myth. Myth, we must remind ourselves, is mostly what Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis was all about. Nevertheless, there was more to her and her life than made the tabloids. (Until 11 p.m.)

Midnight (2) Austin City Limits. Featuring music from John Mayer, with Buddy Guy and Double Trouble. (Until 1 a.m.)

SUNDAY 16

1:00 (12) Football. The Baltimore Ravens versus the Miami Dolphins. Unless CBS decides to go with the New York Jets and the Indianapolis Colts at 4 p.m.

1:00 (64) Football. The New York Giants versus the Philadelphia Eagles.

4:00 (64) Football. The Green Bay Packers versus the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

5:00 (2) Masterpiece Theatre: Doctor Zhivago, part two. Repeated from Friday at 12:30 a.m.

5:30 (44) Butterfield 8 (movie). Liz Taylor got an Oscar for playing a high-end hooker in this extremely popular 1960 movie. Laurence Harvey co-stars as the client who finds her heart of gold. Taylor’s second hubby, crooner Eddie Fisher, also turns up. (Until 7:20 p.m.)

7:00 (6) The AMA Red Carpet Party. All the build-up to the American Music Awards — which won’t air in Boston until 12:05 a.m. (Until 8 p.m.)

7:20 (44) Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (movie). More Liz Taylor, this time with Big Daddy Burl Ives ("Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer") in a 1958 adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Southern soaper. Liz, of course, is Maggie the Cat; Paul Newman plays Big Daddy’s little disappointment, Brick. (Until 9:10 p.m.)

8:00 p.m. (6) The American Music Awards. It’s Justin Timberlake versus Kid Rock, Celine Dion versus Jennifer Lopez, and Matchbox 20 versus Fleetwood Mac!? Plus about a million presenters including Hall & Oates and Weird Al Yankovic. (Until 3:05 a.m.)

9:00 (2) Coyote Waits. This "eagerly anticipated" Robert Redford–produced adaptation of a Navajo-cop yarn by Tony Hillerman has been anticipated by no one more than WGBH, which has been hyping the thing relentlessly for the past month. Wes Studi (Magua in the 1992 The Last of the Mohicans) and Adam Beach star as desert crimefighters Leaphorn and Chee. No plot details available, but to judge from the trailer, most of the action takes place in poorly lit circumstances. To be repeated (and repeated) tonight at midnight and 4 a.m., and on Channel 44 at 1 and 4 a.m., and on Wednesday at 9 p.m. and 1 a.m., and on Channel 44 on Wednesday at 1 and 4 a.m. (Until 11 p.m.)

9:00 (12) The Reagans (movie), part one. Ooops. That’s been "postponed." (See "The 525th line" for the total screed.) Whatever will CBS show instead? Bedtime for Bonzo? Triumph of the Will? (Until you can’t trust anybody.)

9:10 (44) Raintree County (movie). A Civil War drama in which Elizabeth Taylor plays the belle with her bonnet set for Montgomery Clift. (Until midnight.)

MONDAY 17

8:00 (44) Globe Trekker: Baja, California. Trekker Ian Wright heads for Tijuana and points south. Along the way, he sees lots of cactus, lots of faded glory (a San Quentin hotel built for Hollywood stars), whales (close up), and an ancient Tarahumara Indian ritual. (Until 9 p.m.)

9:00 (2) The American Experience: The Kennedys, part one. Can’t find the Reagan mini-series on Channel 4? Well, here’s a repeat of this very thorough and ultimately inspiring family portrait. Part two airs on Tuesday at 9 p.m. To be repeated tonight at 1:30 a.m., and on Channel 44 at 1 and 4 a.m. (Until 11 p.m.)

9:00 (6) Football. The Pittsburgh Steelers versus the San Francisco 49ers.

TUESDAY 18

7:30 (2) La Plaza: Conversations with Ilan Stavans: David Carrasco. The topic is religion in Mesoamerica. Carrasco is a Harvard Divinity School professor. (Until 8 p.m.)

8:00 (2) Nova: Magnetic Storm. At 2:44 a.m. on March 13, 1989, the lights went out for six million people for nine hours thanks to a downed transformer in the HydroQuebec system. The culprit wasn’t terrorists or air conditioners but electric currents running through the earth because of unruly "space weather." To be repeated tonight at 12:30 a.m. (Until 9 p.m.)

9:00 (2) The American Experience: The Kennedys, part two. The conclusion. To be repeated tonight at 1:30 a.m., and on Channel 44 at 1 and 4 a.m. (Until 11 p.m.)

9:00 (12) The Reagans (movie), part two. Ooops! Another hole in the programming. Perhaps they could come up with a documentary report on how well things are going in Iraq. (Until you’re afraid to open your mouth on the bus for fear of being hauled off by the secret police.)

9:00 (44) Indie Select: Vis-à-Vis: Native Tongues. Australian aboriginal actress Ningali Lawford and American Indian performance artist James Luna compare notes on confronting stereotypes. (Until 10 p.m.)

10:00 (44) Independent Lens: Foto-Novelas 2. Two short pieces, one a thriller set in an auto junkyard in Texas, the second a fictionalized account of the 1948 plane crash that killed 28 Mexican illegals and visa violators at Los Gatos near Fresno, California (the inspiration for Woody Guthrie’s "Deportees"). (Until 11 p.m.)

Midnight (2) Fiesta in the Sky. Run out of new programming? Don’t know what to do with this half-hour? Hey, just plug in the Fiesta in the Sky tape. Chances are, nobody’s ever actually watched the whole thing anyway. (Until 12:30 a.m.)

WEDNESDAY 19

8:00 (2) JFK: Breaking the News. A documentary on the broadcast coverage of the JFK assassination, 40 sad years ago. Most of our readers weren’t born; we were in high school and found out when the school PA system suddenly came on in the middle of some radio report. (Spoon feeding was not in vogue back in 1963.) (Until 9 p.m.)

THURSDAY 20

9:00 (2) Frontline: Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald? A biography of the presumed JFK-murder trigger man. But don’t be misled. Kennedy was killed by the political right. If the Mafia or the Cubans were involved, they represented the means, not the will. And Oswald was everybody’s patsy, silenced by Jack Ruby before he could let anything important slip. To be repeated tonight at 1 a.m., and on Channel 44 at 3 a.m. (Until midnight.)

9:00 (6) The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy. Peter Jennings reports on how modern forensics can looks past both the government whitewash and the JFK-assassination conspiracy theorists to uncover the truth about the Kennedy murder. Of course, this could be another whitewash. In fact, if it doesn’t implicate Richard Nixon, we’d be disinclined to give the investigation much credibility. The JFK-assassination mystery settled for all time? Hardly. (Until 11 p.m.)

The 525th line. Department of Filthy Cowardly Scum: in the matter of CBS and its decision to pacify the nation’s right-wing morons and their cynical manipulators by canning the scheduled Ronnie Reagan bio-pic this month, we can only say . . . well, we could launch into a stream of profane invectives, but you get the idea. CBS sucks. CBS is now an arm of the Bush administration. CBS is now responsible for all the suffering in America that’s resulted from the exploitation of September 11 for political gain by the Bushies and the right. CBS is not the censored; CBS is the censor. CBS deserves to suffer. Instead, CBS and its corporate parent will no doubt be rewarded by the same creeps who hand out government contracts to their oil cronies. This is a major-league disgrace — a genuine hey-your-world-really-is-falling-apart outrage.

Now, Reagan himself was a putz — a mild-mannered, empty-headed figurehead who sat in Washington and let the GOP and its junk-bond-huckstering, savings-and-loan-looting, contra-backing fascist supporters run wild while he smiled and convinced fellow feeble-minded Americans that he was a caring, grandfatherly leader. Bullshit! All of that.

Reagan was a puppet and a pig. He brought long-term debt and economic unbalance to the country in exchange for pats on the back from his fast-buck-chasing backers. He abandoned the nation’s poor and marooned our racial minorities in cultural and economic ghettos that, to this day, condemn them and their children to, at best, low-wage jobs. And his wife was a cosmetic-surgery junkie who showed every symptom of being a speed freak. We wouldn’t watch any movie about the Reagans, because no matter how badly they were portrayed, it would fall short of the obvious dark truth about that administration. And without having seen the thing, we can safely assume the lamented CBS bio was, if not totally flattering to our 40th president, at least not the total condemnation of him and his short-sighted bankrupt policies he deserves.

Still, the string pullers on the right don’t want even a hint of criticism to hit the network airwaves now that their current toady, GW, is starting to show his seams. Critics have gone so far as to suggest that when the film does air on Showtime, it be labeled "fiction" (the same suggestion was not made for NBC’s Jessica Lynch fantasy), and that historians be given air time to critique the script’s accuracy. To that latter idea, we say, "Bring ’em on." We’d love to hear political analysts pick the movie apart and explain that it’s inaccurate because the real Reagans were far more destructive than the portrayals by James Brolin and Judy Davis would have you think. CBS now stands for Co-opted By Satan.