1) “New Amsterdam” season-finale, 9 p.m., NBC. This is an extraordinary episode. That’s partly because of the prologue, which we aren’t supposed to tell about. But it’s mostly because of the rare subtlety: Medical shows tend to crank up the emotion; they assume it’s more dramatic to have kin weeping and wailing. In truth, we suspect, it’s more common to have muted resolve. That’s what you get in tough moments here, played with subtle perfection by the actors and new director Dinh Thai.
2) “The Gene: An Intimate History,” 8-10 p.m., PBS. Back in 2015, Ken Burns produced a richly detailed documentary on cancer, based on Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book. Now they’ve linked again, with another Mukherjee best-seller. This tells the history of gene research and views modern struggles, including a young scientist trying to find a cure for her own ailment.
3) “Empire,” 9 p.m., Fox. We’re a week from the finale of what was once a terrific series and is now … well, loudly interesting. Last week, the loudest portion was apparently settled: The bipolar Andre thought he was drowning his late half-brother Kingsley in a baptismal pool. Now other questions loom: Can Lucious fix Andre’s business errors? Can Cookie relaunch the BossyFest event? And did Hakeem and Maya really get married – he doesn’t seem to remember it – on a drunken Las Vegas night.
4) “One Day at a Time,” 9:30 p.m., Pop. Now that Easter is gone, here’s a Halloween episode. (Maybe our calendar is broken.) That brings lots of loud, lame jokes; fortunately, the episode also has a mistaken-assumption plot that builds quite cleverly. And in a brief scene, we see Marla Gibbs (“The Jeffersons”) as a neighbor. At 88, she’s the same age as series co-star Rita Moreno, but much younger than producer Norman Lear, 97.
5) ALSO: It was back in the 1980s that Christopher Lloyd won two Emmys (for “Taxi”) and co-starred in “Back to the Future.” Now Lloyd, 81, guests on CBS’ “NCIS.” That’s at 8 p.m. … when Fox, oddly, reruns the “Masked Singer” hour that drew a big audience after the Super Bowl. At about 10:10 p.m., NBC follows “New Amsterdam” with a news special: “Coronavirus Pandemic.”