The new TV movie A Mother’s Courage:...

The new TV movie A Mother’s Courage: The Mary Thomas Story (NBC Sunday at 7 p.m.) stars Alfre Woodard as a Chicago ghetto mother whose son grows up to be the Detroit Pistons’ Isiah Thomas (Garland Spencer). The conclusion arrives next Sunday at 7 p.m.

Hard Driver (Channel 9 Sunday at 8 p.m.), also known as “The Last American Hero,” is an engaging 1973 movie inspired by an Esquire piece by Tom Wolfe on champion car racer Junior Johnson, who is played by Jeff Bridges.

Christine Lahti and Jeff Daniels play a homeless couple with two children in the new TV movie No Place Like Home (CBS Sunday at 9 p.m.), which was directed by Lee Grant.

True Blue (NBC Sunday at 9 p.m.), a two-hour series pilot, focuses on the Emergency Service Unit of the New York City Police Department. Tony Lo Bianco and Amanda Plummer star.

Another new TV movie, adapted from a Rosamunde Pilcher novel, The Shell Seekers (ABC Sunday at 9 p.m.) stars Angela Lansbury (on the cover) as an Englishwoman reviewing her life with her adult children in mind.

In Incident at Dark River (TNT Monday at 5 and 7 p.m.), a made-for-cable movie, Mike Farrell and Tess Harper play the parents of a family adversely affected by the presence of toxic waste in their community.

The 1981 True Confessions (Channel 5 Monday at 8 p.m.), an engrossing, richly detailed portrait of corruption and ethnicity, stars Robert De Niro as an ambitious monsignor and Robert Duvall as his brother, a tough LAPD cop, whose lives are blighted by a Black Dahlia-like murder case. It is based on the John Gregory Dunne novel.

Howard Beach: Making the Case for Murder (NBC Monday at 9 p.m.), a new TV movie, dramatizes the 1986 incident in which a group of white teen-agers in Queens attacked three blacks, whose car had broken down in their community. William Daniels and Daniel J. Travanti star.

Miracle on 34th Street (Channel 11 Tuesday at 8 p.m.), that Christmas season perennial, lives on warmly in our collective memory. Edmund Gwenn is the Macy’s Santa who believes he really is Kris Kringle, and Natalie Wood is the little girl who wants him to prove it. Alas, it is being shown colorized.

Over the Top (CBS Tuesday at 9 p.m.), one of Sylvester Stallone’s worst, is a bogus heart-tugger, climaxing in a Vegas arm-wrestling contest, about a down-on-his-luck trucker (Stallone) and his snobbish, estranged 12-year-old son (David Mendenhall).

It’s unlikely that even Carole Lombard and Clark Gable could have done anything with the absolute obtuseness of Shanghai Surprise (Channel 5 Wednesday at 8 p.m.), the 1986 disaster that teamed Madonna as a bobby-soxed missionary in Japanese-occupied China in 1973 and her then-husband Sean Penn as an adventurer she hires to capture a cache of opium to ease the pain of the wounded.

In White Christmas (Channel 13 Thursday at 7:30 p.m.), a 1954 VistaVision remake of the much better 1942 “Holiday Inn,” Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye are Army buddies who liven up a winter resort run by their former commanding officer (Dean Jagger), with Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen as their leading ladies. What’s best are the Irving Berlin tunes.

The notoriously overblown and long-winded 1963 Taylor-Burton Cleopatra surfaces on Channel 5, airing in two parts on Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m.

Say One for Me (Channel 11 Thursday at 8 p.m.), another Bing Crosby film, finds the crooner playing a Broadway priest concerned with the problems of chorine Debbie Reynolds.

The Night They Saved Christmas (Channel 11 Friday at 8 p.m.) is a pleasant 1984 TV movie starring Jaclyn Smith in a fantasy-adventure about a mother and her three children who finds themselves on a wondrous journey to the North Pole, where they alone can save Santa Claus (Art Carney, a delight) and his immense toy factory from destruction.

It would be hard to imagine a holiday season without a screening of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (Channel 28 Saturday at 10:05 p.m.). It’s Capra’s favorite among his films, as it is also James Stewart’s. A disappointment when it was released in 1946, it has become a beloved classic, an answer to a conscientious, small-town Everyman (Stewart) who in despair decides that he’s better off dead than alive and even wishes he had never been born in the first place. The angel who changes his mind is Henry Travers.