Requiem for Frank Lee Smith (April 11; 9 to 10 p.m.; Channel 13), in which Ofra Bikel and Frontline find yet another innocent man on death row in Florida, comes too late to help Smith, who died of cancer eleven months before DNA evidence would prove him innocent of rape and murder – but nine years after the star witness against him recanted her testimony.
Sexaholix … A Love Story (April 13; 10 to 11:45 p.m.; HBO) is John Leguizamo explaining on the Beacon Theatre stage what it was like growing up Latino in Queens, where one of his best friends “spoke in the past tense because he had no future,” and how it feels to be a father of two with a Jewish girlfriend.
Nero Wolfe (April 14; 8 to 10 p.m.; A&E) launches another season with a movie in which Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) and Archie Goodwin (Timothy Hutton) investigate a murder that Inspector Cramer (Bill Smitrovich) wants to pin on one of Wolfe’s own operatives. We seem to be in the fifties now, rather than the thirties or forties. As satisfying as this movie is, the next hour-long installment is a disappointment and a botch. Quality control, please!
The Pilot’s Wife (April 14; 9 to 11 p.m.; CBS), based on a novel by Anita Shreve, sustains our interest not only because it stars Christine Lahti as the widow of a pilot (John Heard) whose jet explodes in midair off the coast of Ireland but also because it’s genuinely literate about everything from marital secrets to the politics of terror, and director Robert Markowitz has painted it all with a palette of bruised grays.
Southern Comfort (April 14; 10 to 11:30 p.m.; HBO) sends Kate Davis and America Undercover to rural Georgia to spend a year in the company of transsexuals Robert Eads, born female, and Lola Cola, born male, who have managed against the impossible odds to find and love each other before Robert dies of ovarian cancer.
Broken Silence (April 15 through April 19; 7 to 8 p.m.; Cinemax) comprises five documentaries in which Holocaust survivors are interviewed by such stylistically different filmmakers as the Hungarian Janos Szasz, the Argentine Luis Puenzo, the Russian Pavel Chukhraj, the Czech Vojtech Jasny, and the Pole Andrzej Wajda. You think you’ve heard and seen it all before.You haven’t.