To keep you talking

Tuesday brings the PBS “Frontline” documentary “The Choice: 2016,” an election-year tradition since 1988, which, like Monday night’s debate, stands the candidates side by side for the electorate to compare and contrast. The approach here is psychobiographical, an attempt to comprehend the contestants in respect to the forces that shaped them, the nurture that created the nature that defines their aims and works, and in that sense it is sympathetic to both. Both, we hear, are “fighters who have spent decades in the public eye,” “symbols of a bitterly divided country” whose “life stories … have led them to this moment” — which is pretty much where the resemblance ends. More interesting is the portrait of how differently two people, born a little more than a year apart, have represented their generation, navigated their times and defined success — the influence of Methodism and Martin Luther King on Clinton and that of Norman Vincent Peale and Hugh Hefner on Trump.

As in the debates, policy is less the point than personality. Accordingly, it’s the reporting on their earlier years that’s most interesting. I don’t know how many votes “The Choice” might change, but you may come away with a little better understanding of the person you don’t support, for what that’s worth.

It’s suggested by the filmmakers that his running for president was spurred by his being publicly mocked by Barack Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. It makes as much sense as anything.

“The Choice: 2016”: 9 p.m. PT, Tuesday. PBS SoCal

Nature versus nurture is also one of the subjects tackled in “Debate Wars,” a recently premiered series from SeeSo, NBCUniversal’s streaming comedy channel. “Popeye,” says Connor Ratliff by way of example. “He didn’t always like spinach. He had to be nurtured into liking spinach by his father, Poopdeck Pappy . ... Strong to the finish. Not because his nature, because of his nurture.”

Under the watchful, arbitrary eye of host Michael Ian Black, teams of comics argue the superiority of cake versus pie, dogs versus cats, vacation versus staycation, Internet versus IRL, in remarks both prepared and extempore.

As debates go, it’s closer to the forensic ideal than what you may have seen from the stage at Hofstra on Monday, even though the syllogisms might go comically awry, where materials that would ordinarily build a house produce a giraffe. Comedy, even in a one-liner, is argument, not mere assertion; it’s funny only when you can see the sense the nonsense upends — it’s expecting a house that makes the giraffe hilarious.

“Debate Wars”: now streaming on SeeSo

This week also sees the return of Derek Waters’ “Drunk History,” in which notable events of the American past are related by a well-informed but also inebriated person, whose recorded words become the narration and dialogue (mimed and acted by costumed actors) of an elaborate re-creation. A fourth season of this singular series, which makes history oddly more vivid and present when seen through a veil of alcohol, would have seemed too much to hope for back when it transitioned from Web series to cable TV.

But here it is again, with an opening episode built around the theme of “Great Escapes,” featuring Thomas Lennon as Timothy Leary; Chris Parnell as Charles Joughin, the baker who survived the Titanic; and Thomas Middleditch as William Willis, an American sailor who helped a man break out of Devil’s Island. (Also dressing up this season are Giancarlo Esposito, Maya Rudolph, Tony Hale, Will Ferrell, Octavia Spencer and many others. The inebriated narrators include Paget Brewster, Bob Odenkirk, Jenny Slate, and the year’s big score, Lin-Manuel Miranda, narrating tales from the life of Alexander Hamilton.)

The Comedy Central series runs on tension — the interplay between the drunk and the sober, the historical event and the contemporary vernacular, and the fact that every character is played simultaneously by two people. But it is also a celebration: In getting hammered, the storytellers’ respect and enthusiasm for their assigned or chosen subjects only increases, until they are no longer able to form words to express it.

“Drunk History”: 10:30 p.m. Tuesdays. Comedy Central