What’s on TV This Week: ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’ and ‘We Need to Talk About Cosby’

Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Feb. 14-20. Details and times are subject to change.

Monday

THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE (2021) 6:48 p.m. on HBO. Jessica Chastain was nominated for an Oscar last week for her performance as the TV evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker in this biopic. It’s a juicy role: Bakker (who was later known as Tammy Faye Messner, after marrying Roe Messner in 1993) became famous in the 1970s and ’80s for the Christian broadcasting empire she built with her first husband, Jim Bakker, which came to a crashing, highly publicized end fueled by sex and fraud. Directed by Michael Showalter (“The Big Sick”), the film follows Bakker from her childhood in Minnesota through her time at a Bible college where she met Jim (played by Andrew Garfield), and on to their eventual falls from grace. It’s a role that Chastain had long pursued. “She never really did anything halfway,” Chastain said of Bakker in an interview with The New York Times last year. “She didn’t have an ounce of being cool or being aloof about her. So I just felt like I couldn’t dip my toe in or be cool and aloof in the performance. I had to jump in the most wild, extreme way. Because that’s how she lived every moment.”

INDEPENDENT LENS: BULLETPROOF (2021) 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The reality of active-shooter fears in American schools takes on a surreal quality in this documentary. The film looks at measures being taken by some schools — educators training at shooting ranges, classrooms outfitted with security camera systems and armored doors — with a detached but meticulously shot fly-on-the-wall style. “The accomplishment of the director Todd Chandler,” Teo Bugbee wrote in a review for The Times, “is that he continues to find settings that demonstrate this same eerie divide between the desire for security, and the extreme measures being taken by schools to achieve impregnability.”

Tuesday

ICAHN: THE RESTLESS BILLIONAIRE (2022) 9 p.m. on HBO. In this documentary, Carl C. Icahn, the billionaire investor and erstwhile Trump administration adviser, describes himself as a product of the financial system. “I made this money because the system is so bad,” Icahn says, “not because I’m a genius.” Directed by Bruce David Klein, the film looks at Icahn’s career in the context of national economic issues. It includes commentary from financial figures and journalists, including the Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Wednesday

AD ASTRA (2019) 7:35 and 9:55 p.m. on FXM. How would you handle being told, in a top-secret meeting with United States defense bigwigs, that your long-lost dad may be alive? Chances are you’d betray more emotion than Brad Pitt’s Maj. Roy McBride, an at-first inscrutable astronaut who is sent to the stars to find his famous spaceman father (played by Tommy Lee Jones) in this somber space movie from the filmmaker James Gray. Gray uses the spectacle of the stars and the isolation of extraterrestrial travel to explore the mind inside the space helmet and a complicated, only superficially space-related father-son relationship. It’s a movie that “tends to work best in isolated scenes rather than in the aggregate,” Manohla Dargis said in her review for The Times. But, Dargis wrote, Pitt’s “soulful, nuanced performance — which becomes incrementally more externalized and visible, as if McBride were shedding a false face — holds the film together even when it starts to fray.”

Thursday

THE GAME PLAN 7 p.m. on TNT. Shaquille O’Neal is the host of this new reality series, in which O’Neal and other celebrities — including the retired W.N.B.A. star Lisa Leslie and the rappers Quavo, Killer Mike and Big Boi — meet Atlanta-based entrepreneurs. This is no “Shark Tank,” though: The focus of this warm series is on helping each of the businesses succeed, with O’Neal and company offering advice and encouragement.

Friday

PAINTING WITH JOHN 11 p.m. on HBO. The artist and musician John Lurie’s surrealist, quasi-painting show returns for a second season on Friday night. The first season was a perhaps unlikely success last year: Slow-burning and effortlessly bizarre, it found Lurie ruminating on his own life — and the creative life more broadly — from his Caribbean island home. That will continue in the second season, along with some painting. Probably.

Saturday

IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967) 8 p.m. on TCM. When Sidney Poitier died last month, at 94, the Times critic Wesley Morris joined “The Daily” to discuss Poitier’s legacy as a transformational figure in American cinema and America at large. One moment that Morris pointed to is in this Mississippi mystery. Poitier plays a police detective, Virgil Tibbs, who has been enlisted to help a small-town sheriff (played by Rod Steiger) solve a murder. The pair visit a local cotton magnate, Endicott (Larry Gates), who is powerful enough to be known by only his last name. When Tibbs insinuates that Endicott is a suspect in the murder investigation, Endicott slaps Tibbs. Tibbs slaps back, and Poitier breaks ground: That slap, Morris said, “is a reversal for everything that had happened to a Black person previously in the movies.” Revisit it on Saturday night in a double feature with an earlier Poitier movie, THE DEFIANT ONES (1958), which TCM will air at 10 p.m.

Sunday

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT COSBY 10 p.m. on Showtime. “There are two runaway forces of oppression in America,” the comic W. Kamau Bell said in an interview with The Times. “One, how we treat nonwhite people. The other is how we have treated women through the history of this country. And if you look at Bill Cosby’s career, you can see things he did that makes this better and makes this worse.” Bell makes a nuanced attempt to explore both of those sides of Cosby in this documentary series, which looks at Cosby’s life and legacy. Sunday night’s episode is the fourth and final installment, but don’t expect a tidy ending: Something that makes the series uncommonly effective, the Times’s TV critic James Poniewozik wrote recently, is that it “holds Cosby’s achievements and his wrongs close, and it recognizes that there may be unresolvable dissonance between the two.”