A celebration of Attenborough’s life

Sir David Attenborough saw his first natural-history film in 1934, when he was still a young child. “It made me dream of travelling to far-off places to film wild animals,” Attenborough recalls. The three-part Attenborough’s Life Stories is a celebration of his 60 years on television. Together with CBC’s recent 50 Years of the Nature of Things, a celebration of David Suzuki’s life recording the natural world, it’s a reminder that public broadcasting is the last bastion of quality when it comes to nature filmmaking. It works on the assumption that the TV audience is intelligent, inquisitive … and awake to the world around them.

Wednesday’s Life Stories, Understanding the Natural World, follows Attenborough’s voyage of scientific discovery over five decades. (8 p.m., WPBS)

The Americans is one of the most cerebral, tensionfilled new drama series in recent memory. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys play Russian sleeper agents living a seemingly quiet, sedate life in a Washington, D.C. suburb in the early 1980s, in the last days of the Cold War, when Ronald Reagan was president and the Soviets were bogged down in the war in Afghanistan. (10 p.m., FX Canada)

You won’t see those spiffy Super Bowl ads you keep hearing about this weekend: CTV will pre-empt CBS’s broadcast signal wherever it reaches in Canada. Your only chance to catch up, then — short of watching grainy YouTube video the following morning — may well be Wednesday’s one-off special Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials 2013, a countdown of the best ads from the past. (8 p.m., CBS)

On their way back from a wedding in Wednesday’s Arctic Air, bad weather forces Bobby (Adam Beach), Krista (Pascale Hutton) and Bobby (John Reardon) to make an emergency landing in the proverbial middle of nowhere. They take shelter in an abandoned way station, only to learn it isn’t as abandoned as they thought. (9 p.m., CBC)