TV TOP PICKS
7 p.m. on ABC The Great Christmas Light Fight
Lifestyle expert Carter Oosterhouse, pictured, right, and interior designer Taniya Nayak, left, return as the celebrity judges, as this popular holiday decorating competition series opens Season 6. Showcasing some of the most spectacular, if not totally over-the-top, Christmas displays in the United States, each episode features four families from a given American location who take decking their halls to the extreme in a bid to win the Light Fight trophy and $50,000 prize.
7 p.m. on NGEO Mars
A solar flare that strikes Mars knocks out communications in the colonies, as Olympus Town feverishly searches to locate exobiologist Marta Kamen (Anamaria Marinca). Elsewhere, Amelie’s (Clementine Poidatz) plans to returns to Earth hit a major snag, and the colonists prepare for the first human pregnancy on the red planet. In a present-day sequence back on Earth, scientists submit themselves to some harsh conditions as they pursue data they hope will predict how glacial melt will affect sea levels.
8 p.m. on FOX 9-1-1
As they’ve come to expect by now, the holiday season proves to be a mixed bag of “naughty” and “nice” for the first responders, who are summoned to an escalating dispute between neighbors vying in a Christmas lights competition, a mistletoerelated stunt that goes amiss and a stampede among shoppers at a toy store in the mid-season finale, “Merry Ex-Mas.” Meanwhile, Bobby (Peter Krause) ponders a future with Athena (Angela Bassett) and Eddie (Ryan Guzman) considers his son’s wish to visit his mom.
9 p.m. on NBC Manifest
Michaela and Ben (Melissa Roxburgh, Josh Dallas) put everything on the line to save the other missing passengers, but the rescue mission goes tragically awry and not everyone makes it out alive in a new episode called “Dead Reckoning.” In the bleak aftermath, Ben and Grace (Athena Karkanis) feel pushed to the breaking point, while Michaela and Jared (J.R. Ramirez) wind up dangerously close together.
11 p.m. on HBO Movie: The Truth About Killer Robots
File it under science nonfiction, if you like: This new documentary from Maxim Pozdorovkin highlights incidents wherein robots have been responsible for the deaths of human beings, in contexts ranging from a bomb-carrying droid routinely used by police officers in Dallas to a Tesla automobile that is reputed to be “self-driving.” Few would try to argue there was any premeditation in these deaths, but such mishaps do raise valid questions about accountability, legality and morality.