What’s on TV This Week: ‘Fight the Power’ and ‘The Ark’

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, Jan. 30 to Feb. 5. Details and times are subject to change.

Monday

EAST OF EDEN (1955) 3:45 p.m. on TCM. In this classic adaptation, the director Elia Kazan brings to the screen John Steinbeck’s semi-autobiographical work of fiction, which incorporates the history of his family into a modern-day retelling of the Book of Genesis’s story of Cain and Abel. The film is set in California’s Salinas Valley on the eve of World War I and follows the ever-changing and evolving dynamics between the Trask family — a lettuce farmer, Adam (Raymond Massey), and his twin sons, Aron (Richard Davalos), the favorite, and Caleb (James Dean), the jealous rebel who yearns for Adam’s love. “This is not a simple tale of good and evil, of crime and punishment,” A.O. Scott, the New York Times co-chief film critic, described in a 2011 video feature on the film. And “this is not what you find in the Bible,” Scott said. “In place of a religious conception of human nature based on fixed ideas of good and bad, ‘East of Eden’ proposes a psychological dynamic of complicated human relationships.”

Tuesday

FIGHT THE POWER: HOW HIP HOP CHANGED THE WORLD 9 p.m. on PBS. From the Grammy-nominated rapper Chuck D and his producing partner, Lorrie Boula, comes a new series that examines the relationship between hip-hop and the political history of the United States. The series features interviews with Killer Mike, Will.i.am, Monie Love, Ice-T, Roxanne Shante, MC Lyte and others as it traces the genre from its start as an underground movement in the Bronx to its emergence as one of the most popular music categories in the country. Tuesday’s premiere begins with an exploration of the art form’s origins.

Wednesday

THE ARK 10 p.m. on Syfy. This new science fiction series from Dean Devlin, a producer of the films “Stargate,” “Independence Day” and “Godzilla,” and Jonathan Glassner, a producer of the TV show “Stargate SG-1,” takes place 100 years in the future aboard a self-sustaining spaceship tasked with finding humanity a new home as Earth becomes uninhabitable. The series focuses on the human condition as a diverse cast of characters reacts to unforeseen catastrophes aboard the vessel.

Thursday

BELFAST (2021) 6:20 p.m. on FX. An Academy Award nominee and a winner of the People’s Choice Award, “Belfast” is a semi-autobiographical film from Kenneth Branagh that is based on his childhood in Northern Ireland during the conflict known as “The Troubles.” Set in 1969, the film follows 9-year-old Buddy (Jude Hill), the fictional version of Branagh, as he lives through an ethnonationalist conflict between the loyalists (mostly Protestants) and unionists (referred to as the Catholics) that he doesn’t understand. “While ‘Belfast’ is, in one sense, a deeply personal coming-of-age tale, it’s also a more universal story of displacement and detachment,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for The Times.

Friday

RENT (2005) 4:05 p.m. on HBO2. Adapted from the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning Broadway musical loosely based on Giacomo Puccini’s opera “La Bohème,” “Rent” focuses on the trials and tribulations of a group of friends living in an unheated East Village apartment in New York during the H.I.V. and AIDS crisis. Beginning on Christmas Eve 1989 and ending a year later, the film follows Mark (Anthony Rapp), an aspiring filmmaker; Roger (Adam Pascal), an H.I.V.-positive recovering addict; Benny (Taye Diggs), a roommate turned landlord; and Maureen (Idina Menzel), an activist and Mark’s ex-girlfriend, on their journeys through love, addiction and disease. “The movie applied a cinematic sheen to the scenes of this seedier New York,” the Times critic Maya Phillips wrote in a 2020 essay. Still, she wrote, “the message of ‘Rent’ isn’t just a glib carpe diem but a resounding declaration of ‘stand with your community despite’ and ‘make art despite.’”

Saturday

MALCOLM X (1992), COOLEY HIGH (1975) and SOUNDER (1972) at 4:30 p.m., 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. on TCM. During its Black History Month Saturdays, Turner Classic Movies is celebrating with eight works of Black cinema. Its roundup is a collection of both obscure and highly regarded films that work together to represent a range of actors, directors and stories. The three films playing on Saturday are representative of that collection, starting with a biographical drama on the life of Malcolm X (played by Denzel Washington) from Spike Lee, who used Malcolm X’s autobiography and an unfinished screenplay by Arnold Perl to inform the film. Next are two coming-of-age films, starting with “Cooley High,” which “documents perhaps that last moment in modern American history — 1964 — when it was possible for young Blacks to see their color as simply one of the components of their personalities,” Jack Slater wrote in his 1975 review of the film for The Times. The film, based on the experiences of its writer, Eric Monte, and produced by Michael Schultz, who today is credited as one of the longest-working Black directors in history, is set on Chicago’s Near North Side and follows the high jinks of a group of friends in their last year of high school. The night is rounded off with the Oscar-nominated classic “Sounder,” a Depression-era movie that centers on two Louisiana sharecroppers, Nathan (Paul Winfield) and Rebecca (Cicely Tyson), their three children and the family dog, Sounder.

Sunday

AMERICAN PAIN 9 p.m. on CNN. This special, directed by the documentary filmmaker Darren Foster (“Science Fair”), traces the rise and fall of two of America’s most prolific opioid kingpins: the identical twins Chris and Jeff George, who trafficked more than $500 million in opioid pills. Through F.B.I. wiretap recordings, undercover videos and jailhouse interviews, the documentary explores the lives of the George twins and how they helped fuel one of the worst drug epidemics in U.S. history.