The affecting 1991 Fire in the Dark...

The affecting 1991 Fire in the Dark (CBS Sunday at 9 p.m.), one of the rare TV dramas about old people, is enlivened by a gnarly, bone-brittle performance by Olympia Dukakis as a progressively ailing widow who refuses to move out of her home while her grown children squabble over her destiny.

The 1988 A Fish Called Wanda (ABC Sunday at 9 p.m.) offers more silly stuff from writer-star John Cleese and Michael Palin: a dottily cynical, hilarious update of “The Lavender Hill Mob” in which British twits are undermined by American hit men, until the worm gloriously turns. With Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis.

In the diverting, trickily plotted 1991 psychological twister Don’t Touch My Daughter (NBC Monday at 9 p.m.), Victoria Principal plays a dowdy high-school teacher whose 11-year-old daughter (Danielle Harris) is the victim of a molester (Jonathan Banks).

The 1978 National Lampoon’s Animal House (ABC Monday at 9 p.m.) became the first in a long line of movies about the outrageous pranks of college kids. John Belushi stars as the worst slob on campus, circa 1962.

The effective 1992 TV movie Quiet Killer (CBS Tuesday at 9 p.m.) stars Kate Jackson as New York City’s chief epidemiologist, confronting a return of the black plague, which connects with our real fears of a world afflicted with AIDS.

Director Wes Craven is in an unexpectedly sentimental mood with the 1986 Deadly Friend (KCOP Thursday at 8 p.m.), the story of a heartsick young man who revives his lost love from the dead, with understandably horrific consequences.

Avalon (KCOP Friday at 8 p.m.), Barry Levinson’s warm and sentimental Baltimore generational family saga, was inspired by his own family and not only charts the immigrant experience but also the impact of TV on the family unit and the flight to the suburbs. Armin Mueller-Stahl, Aidan Quinn and Joan Plowright star.

Peter Bogdanovich’s lively 1972 What’s Up, Doc? (KCOP Saturday at 6 p.m.) is in the fine tradition of ‘30s screwball comedies and finds Ryan O’Neal as an absent-minded musicologist who meets up with Barbra Streisand’s staccato-tongued graduate student, who has whims of iron. Sidney Lumet’s bravura 1975 Dog Day Afternoon (KCOP Saturday at 8 p.m.), stars Al Pacino as a bombastic, none-too-bright loser who sticks up a Brooklyn bank to finance a sex-change operation for his transsexual lover (Chris Sarandon).