Christmas on Division Street (CBS Sunday at...

Christmas on Division Street (CBS Sunday at 9 p.m.), a 1991 TV movie about the transcendence of love, tells the story of an unconventional friendship between an upper-class youth (Fred Savage) and an elderly homeless man (Hume Cronyn).

Necessary Roughness (NBC Sunday at 9 p.m.) offers Scott Bakula in a delightful starring role as a 34-year-old farmer lured back to college to play football. Bakula has a laid-back quality that makes him easy to take on the big screen. The 1991 film is a genial, entirely predictable football comedy, but it serves him--and a TV audience--well.

E.T: The Extra-Terrestial (CBS Monday at 8 p.m.), Steven Spielberg’s landmark 1982 fantasy for all ages, boasts in the title role the most lovable space alien of all time, a miracle of movie magic. Henry Thomas stars.

Nutcracker (KCET Sunday at 8:30 p.m.), Carroll Ballard’s film of the Tchaikovsky Christmas ballet--with a little girl spirited off to magic land by a charmed nutcracker--is often criticized because the dancing (by the Pacific Northwest Ballet) isn’t superior and Ballard’s pyrotechnic editing doesn’t let us see it. (Aren’t these complaints contradictory?) But the 1986 film has some visual riches: children’s illustrator Maurice Sendak’s sets, Ballard’s acrobatic staging and shooting. With Hugh Bigney and Vanessa Sharp.

The provocative Resurrection (KTLA Tuesday at 8 p.m.) deals with healing, love, faith and the tranquil acceptance of death. It raises the possibility of healing by love, rather than by faith. Ellen Burstyn plays a woman whose husband is killed in a car crash. She almost dies too, but survives only to be transformed by new powers, including the power to heal. Directed by Daniel Petrie from a Lewis John Carlino story, the 1980 film has a kind of passionate awkwardness and a sense of earnest inquiry and hope.

Although it takes awhile for Same Time, Next Year (KTLA Thursday at 8 p.m.) not to seem merely a filmed play, it does become very affecting under Robert Mulligan’s direction. Ellen Burstyn and Alan Alda play the annually recurrent lovers, both of them married to others, meeting every year for 26 years at a Mendocino resort. The 1978 film from the Bernard Slade plays is cleverest at winning and holding sympathy for a couple who are betraying what sound like terribly decent partners back home.