Spotlight on Faith Hubley (April 21; 8 to 9 p.m.; Sundance) mixes interview footage of the Oscar winner who died in December with several of her more than 50 animated films, most of them using jazz and myth to make a political point.
Disappearance (April 21; 8 to 10 p.m.; TBS), written and directed by Walter Klenhard, reunites Harry Hamlin and Susan Dey from L.A. Law as an old married couple on vacation with their children in the Nevada desert, where they are menaced in an abandoned mining town by unseen enemies who could be the restless dead in a sacred Indian burial ground, the ghosts of folks who perished in the testing of a neutron bomb, or aliens from Area 51. Not bad, with a creepy conclusion.
Eco-Challenge: NZ (April 21; 8 to 10 p.m.; USA) introduces us to 67 teams from 23 countries who will scurry for twelve days all over New Zealand on mountain bikes, river rafts, and horseback, with prime-time coverage continuing on USA till April 24.
Two Against Time (April 21; 9 to 11 p.m.; CBS) stars Marlo Thomas as a single mother who is having enough trouble with Ellen Muth, her rebellious teenage daughter, before Ellen is discovered to have cancer and must undergo surgery and chemotherapy. Just to complicate the picture, Marlo then finds that she, too, has cancer. Based, of course, on the usual true story, but redeemed by the remarkable mother-daughter performances. In Marlo’s suffering, there is no vanity.
Warning: Parental Advisory (April 21; 9 to 11 p.m.; VH1) is a comic take on the 1985 Senate hearings into “porn rock,” during which Tipper Gore and the Parents Resource Music Center were more or less routed by testimony from musicians like Frank Zappa, Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, and, most eloquently, John Denver, whose “Rocky Mountain High” once had been censored as a drug song. Mariel Hemingway (Gore), Griffin Dunne (Zappa), Tim Guinee (Denver), and Jason Priestley (as a music-industry lobbyist) have fun, but the antics we see at the end suggest that something wonderful might have happened if Warning had been turned into a sort of Cop Rock operetta.