TV HIGHLIGHTS

Movie: The Maltese Falcon, 8 PM on TCM:

Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled private eye Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) finds himself in hot water with a bunch of bad eggs. He searches for a jewelencrusted statue he comes to realize is “the stuff that dreams are made of” while deceits and double-crosses pile up around him. Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre also star in this 1941 film noir classic.

NOVA, 9 PM on Ch. 16 and Ch. 48; 1 AM on Ch. 16 and Ch. 48:

“NOVA Universe Revealed: Milky Way” explores the galaxy that is Earth’s celestial home, an ethereal city of stars so vast that it would take about 100,000 light years to cross it. This episode reveals the wonders of galactic archaeology charted by Gaia, a spacecraft that is creating a precise 3-D map and measuring the movements of more than a billion stars in our galaxy. The results are unlocking a turbulent history of our cosmic neighborhood, from its birth to massive collisions with other galaxies.

Secrets of the Dead, 10 PM on Ch. 16 and Ch. 48; 2 AM on Ch. 16 and Ch. 48:

In “The First Circle of Stonehenge,” an archaeological quest spanning 10 years reveals that the oldest stones in the mysterious circle at Stonehenge originally were part of a much earlier sacred site, a stone circle that was built on a rugged and remote hillside far away in West Wales. Using some of the latest tools in geotechnology, Professor Mike Parker Pearson of University College London leads his team of archaeologists in a painstaking and determined search for evidence that would fill in a 400-year gap in our knowledge.