There are films that confuse excess with...

There are films that confuse excess with honesty--noisy, unpleasant screeds that believe that the best way to serve the truth is by being as overwrought and in-your-face as possible. This theory is put into irritating practice in Murder in the First (NBC Sunday at 8:30 p.m.) Kevin Bacon stars as a 1938 Alcatraz would-be escapee for whom rehabilitation takes on a particularly horrific form under associate warden Milton Glenn (Gary Oldman), a quiet sadist who is not averse to perpetual revenge.

Writer-director David Ward and his co-screenwriter, Aaron Latham, want to show in their 1993 The Program (FOX Tuesday at 8 p.m.) how the high-powered world of college athletics has become corrupt by greed and the limelight and how the sheer love of the game can survive the corruption. “The Program, which stars James Caan as a veteran university football coach, tries to travel light and heavy, but the combination of noggin-banging action and deep-thinking doesn’t gel.

King of New York (KTLA Friday at 8 p.m.) is one of the most stylish jobs by that virtuoso of grunge Abel Ferrara. Christopher Walken plays a feared New York crime lord who, at the start of the 1990 film, is released from prison after five years with detention having inflamed his do-gooder’s soul: He plans to strong-arm the city’s drug lords into redistributing their booty to the poor.

Say what you like about Madonna--and most people do--she is nobody’s fool. If Madonna: Truth or Dare (KCOP Friday at 8 p.m.), the cinema verite documentary of her 1990 Blonde Ambition world tour proves nothing else, it shows her to be a mistress of media control of awesome abilities. Madonna has masterminded a putative show-and-tell-all showcase that in reality is not very revealing at all. She is, however, a treat to hang out with, and that makes “Truth or Dare,” much more amusing more often than you might expect.