Even though the 1995 Outbreak (NBC Sunday...

Even though the 1995 Outbreak (NBC Sunday at 8:30 p.m.) is grounded in some very real global fears about viral crises-in-waiting, it quickly mutates into an action-adventure. The mystery virus--nicknamed motaba--first turns up in 1967 in a mercenary camp in Africa. Next thing you know, the village and all its inhabitants are mysteriously nuked. Cut to the present: The virus is back and Zaire’s got it. Col. Sam Daniels, M.D. (Dustin Hoffman), is sent into the African rain forest to check out the damage by Gen. Billy Ford (Morgan Freeman), his longtime friend and commanding officer. Directed by Wolfgang Petersen, “Outbreak” has its eco-advocacy side: Messing with the rain forest unleashes plagues.

The explosions--or the threat of explosions--just keep on coming in Die Hard with a Vengeance (Fox Tuesday at 8 p.m.). This third installment of the “Die Hard” series, starring Bruce Willis as the heroically beleaguered police officer John McClane, is a grand-scale demolition derby. The trigger for all the kapowie is a cat-and-mouse game between McClane and a malevolent genius who goes by the name Simon (Jeremy Irons). Simon, who has mastered the art of snooty, untraceable phone calls to the N.Y.P.D., bears a king-size, unexplained animus toward McClane.

With the 1991 Sleeping with the Enemy (KTLA Thursday at 8 p.m.), a solid book has been inflated by overproduction and underwriting into thin melodrama to make a vehicle for Julia Roberts, playing an abused wife who tries to begin her life again. Patrick Bergin, uncharismatic as Sir Richard Burton in “Mountains of the Moon,” is even more so here as her menacing husband. It’s another fairy tale for Roberts, wife abuse being seen here as no more grueling than Roberts’ job as a hooker in “Pretty Woman,” and she attacks this role with thesame bland compliance and dazzling superficial warmth.