First Person (August 7; 8 to 8:30 p.m.; IFC), the Errol Morris interview-with-mirrors series that debuted last year on Bravo, returns for a second season and so many camera angles that we sometimes lose track of who’s talking to whom. In this case, we find Morris having fun with Internet entrepreneur Josh Harris, who believes that Gilligan is God and that Bob Denver, the actor who played him on the TV program, is an avatar of a cosmic life force called Messiah 2.0.
Salgado: The Spectre of Hope (August 8; 7 to 8 p.m.; Cinemax) is both a remarkable conversation between Brazilian economist-photographer Sebastião Salgado and British art critic-novelist John Berger and a stunning portrait (in Salgado’s pictures) of what globalization really looks like in Rwanda, Mexico, Mozambique, Sudan, and erstwhile Yugoslavia. Salgado and Berger even discuss their mixed feelings about how suffering becomes “beautiful.”
Going to California (August 9; 10 to 11:30 p.m.; Showtime), a new series from writer-producer Scott Rosenberg (Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead), launches with a movie directed by Peter Howitt (Sliding Doors) in which New England slackers Sam Trammell and Brad Henke hit the road to look for a missing lovelorn friend and discover on their way west an eccentric America that is half Jack Kerouac, half Charles Kuralt. Don’t miss former Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor as Fighting Iris, a Memphis transvestite who busts up a blues bar.
Dinner With Friends (August 11; 9 to 10:45 p.m.; HBO) is Donald Margulies’s adaptation of his play, an improbable Pulitzer Prize winner, about a pair of old-friend married couples who eat, kvetch, vacation, and disintegrate together, with Norman Jewison directing Andie MacDowell, Dennis Quaid, Toni Collette, and Greg Kinnear, who all enjoy their fat, if not altogether meaty, roles. Still, there are some lines here that will make any married couple wince.
Snow in August (August 12; 8 to 9:45 p.m.; Showtime), based on a lovely little novel by Pete Hamill, follows a fatherless Catholic boy (Peter Tambakis) in the Brooklyn summer of 1947 as he eventually accepts the wise counsel of a local rabbi (Stephen Rea) after witnessing a violent crime. There are, as well, a mom (Lolita Davidovich), a golem, and Jackie Robinson.