Best-bets for Oct. 6: masterful drummer; streaming surge

1) “American Masters.” 9 p.m., PBS. Back in the late ‘80s, one man was filming jazz great Max Roach; another made audio recordings of his memories. Much later, they merged, adding old clips and new interviews. Now we see a vivid life, spanning genres; Roach (shown here) ranged from the bebop masters (Monk, Miles, Dizzy) to a rapper. Alongside great music, we gret glimpses of friendship (Clifford Brown), romance (Abby Lincoln) and agony. Read more…

1) “American Masters.” 9 p.m., PBS. Back in the late ‘80s, one man was filming jazz great Max Roach; another made audio recordings of his memories. Much later, they merged, adding old clips and new interviews. Now we see a vivid life, spanning genres; Roach (shown here) ranged from the bebop masters (Monk, Miles, Dizzy) to a rapper. Alongside great music, we gret glimpses of friendship (Clifford Brown), romance (Abby Lincoln) and agony.

2) Soccer, 8 p.m. ET, CBS. Last year, CBS made history with the first primetime broadcast of a National Women’s Soccer League game. That was the championship game, but now the network airs a pre-tournament one. Six of the league’s 12 teams will make the tourney; this game has teams currently in the No. 4 and 6 spots – the Washington Spirit (including Trinity Rodman, daughter of basketball’s Dennis Rodman) at the Reign in Seattle.

3) “The Irrational,” 8 p.m., NBC. Here’s a quick rerun of the show’s second episode, with a reporter being killed Soviet-style, via a slow-moving poison. It’s not nearly as good as the opener and the final trickery is a stretch; still, it arrives on a night when scripted shows are rare and welcome.

4) “Austin City Limit Music Festival” opener, Hulu. Over the next three days, Hulu will have a flurry of performers. The line-up is topped today by Kendrick Lamar, The Lumineers and Maggie Rogers; coming are Foo Fighters, Shania Twain and Alanis Morissette on Saturday and Mumford & Sons and Niall Horan on Sunday, That wraps a Hulu week that already had the”Only Murders in the Building” season-finale and a Sophie Thatcher movie “The Boogeyman.”

5) More streaming. This is a night for murder stories, from loopy (Kiernan Shipka in Amazon Prime’s time-traveling youth tale, “Totally Killer”) to dead-serious (Benicio Del Toro in Netflix’s “Reptile”; also, a Stephen King prequel, “Pet Semetary: Bloodlines,” on Paramount+). For variety, try Disney+; it profiles a charismatic Uganda politician with “Bobi Wine: The People’s President.”

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