With The World According to Garp (Channel...

With The World According to Garp (Channel 13 Sunday at 8 p.m.), writer Steve Tesich and director George Roy Hill try to hew to the heart of the sprawling, surreal John Irving novel, cherishing the fragility of life and illuminating the complicated existence of novelist T.S. Garp (a sweetly randy Robin Williams). However, the only person who seems more than a literary conceit is John Lithgow’s dignified, poignant and funny transsexual who once played tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles.

Although embellished by gorgeous location filming, the 1988 TV movie The Woman He Loved (CBS Sunday at 9 p.m.), in which Jane Seymour and Anthony Andrews play the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, is at best plodding and far inferior to the 1981 “Masterpiece Theatre” version of the Windsor legend.

The crux of the fairly absorbing 1988 TV movie A Stoning in Fulham County (NBC Sunday at 9 p.m.) is that an Amish farmer (Ron Perlman) won’t testify against some assailants, even though his infant daughter is killed.

In Poor Little Rich Girl: The Barbara Hutton Story (NBC Monday at 9 p.m., completed Tuesday at 8 p.m.) Farrah Fawcett manages to bring some dimension to the unhappy heiress whose life seems to have been as hollow as this film.

Murder by Natural Causes (Channel 11 Tuesday at 8 p.m.) is a terrific 1979 made-for-TV thriller, written and produced by Richard Levinson and William Link, with Hal Holbrook and Katharine Ross starring.

Murder: By Reason of Insanity (Channel 11 Wednesday at 8 p.m.) is a solid, fact-based 1985 TV movie, directed by Anthony Page and starring Candice Bergen as a wife battered by a mental-patient husband (Jurgen Prochnow, who is chilling).

The Woman in Red (Channel 13 Wednesday at 8 p.m.) is a sexy but crass 1984 remake of Yves Robert’s infidelity farce, “Pardon Mon Affaire,” and boasts a stunning temptress in Kelly Le Brock and a sterling main-title balladeer in Stevie Wonder.

In the 1987 Dolls (Channel 13 Friday at 8 p.m.), Stuart Gordon, whose first two films were imaginative and bloody H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, is more whimsical and lighthearted in this knowing trapped-in-a-dark-mansion-in-a-hideous rainstorm genre piece featuring menacing children’s playthings.

Vincente Minnelli’s 1952 The Bad and the Beautiful (Channel 5 Saturday at 8 p.m.) remains one of Hollywood’s best commentaries on itself and is as memorable for its David Raksin score as it is for its stellar cast, headed by Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner. The KTLA telecast will be colorized.

The evergreen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with Newman and Redford returns Saturday on Channel 9 at 8 p.m.

As in “Psycho,” Curtis Hanson’s 1987 The Bedroom Window (Channel 13 Saturday at 8 p.m.), a Hitchcockian pastiche about successively deeper layers of voyeurism, terror and guilt, takes us from adultery and deceit to murder and madness. It doesn’t quite jell, but it’s engrossing and has a fine cast headed by Steve Guttenberg, Isabelle Huppert and Elizabeth McGovern.

The 1975 Cousin, Cousine (Channel 28 Saturday at 9 p.m.) remains one of the most popular foreign films, a pleasant romantic fantasy in which cousins by marriage embark upon an affair without much thought for their spouses, who are unsympathetic anyway. With Marie-Christine Barrault, Victor Lanoux.