An outstanding 1990 TV movie, Rising Son...

An outstanding 1990 TV movie, Rising Son (KTLA Sunday at 8 p.m.) is in the tradition of post-war Arthur Miller father-son dramas, with Brian Dennehy as a foreman in a doomed Pennsylvania factory and Matt Damon as the son afraid to tell his father he’s quit school.

Another 48 HRS. (CBS Sunday at 9 p.m.), the 1990 sequel to the 1982 48 HRS. (which airs on HBO next Sunday at 1:45 a.m.) again teams Nick Nolte, since grown into a great actor, and Eddie Murphy, who hasn’t improved on his work in that first film, in a crude rehashing of the high points of the original.

The 1988 Mr. North (KCAL Sunday at 9 p.m.), based on Thornton Wilder’s last novel, stars Anthony Edwards as a brilliant youth, a deceptively diffident warrior in Newport, R.I.’s clashes of class and romance. One misses the presence of John Huston throughout: in taking over for his late director father, Danny Huston neither matches his father’s voice nor finds his own.

As an effervescent, accident-prone accountant Martin Short is typically hilarious, but the 1991 Pure Luck (NBC Monday at 9 p.m.) is, worse luck, more or less forgettable.

A high-energy futuristic 1987 science-fiction thriller about murderous TV game shows, The Running Man (ABC Monday at 9 p.m.) has a comic-book savagery that sometimes undercuts its own ideas about the brutalizing aspect of mass media. Arnold Schwarzenegger stars.

Written by John Patrick Shanley (“Moonstruck,” “Five Corners”) and directed by the Irish-born Pat O’Cooner in 1989, The January Man (KTTV Tuesday at 8 p.m.) manages to be charming and exasperating at the same time. Heading a starry cast, Kevin Kline plays a Manhattan detective-turned-firefighter who returns to his original profession to pursue a serial killer.

A 1988 generic action movie with more guns than brains, more car crashes than coherence and more opportunism than originality, Action Jackson (KCOP Wednesday at 8 p.m.) has its central conflict between two violently improbably--and improbably violent caricatures--a Detroit cop (Carl Weathers, in the title role) and a kung fu maniac crook (Craig T. Nelson). It’s a vicious movie whose tongue-in-cheek approach disguises a moral vacancy.