Decades of regret inspires powerful film

Don’t let its brevity fool you. The 35-minute-long 2021 documentary “When We Were Bullies” (9 p.m., HBO) will be hard to forget. It blends humor and pathos, memory and insight in creative ways.

In the opening scenes, filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt returns to his Brooklyn elementary school and attempts to scale its forbidding iron fences. Older than he’d care to admit, he’s comically inept as a second-story man. He’s drawn there by painful memories of a bullying incident that happened some six decades back, a rather savage outbreak of feral childhood cruelty that he had helped instigate.

Over the course of the short film, he telephones as many of his still-living classmates as he can reach. Some don’t know what he’s talking about, but a surprising number recall the moment in detail and share his sense of remorse. In an oddly comic touch, he juxtaposes the voices of these senior citizens over their class photo headshots from 1965.

In its funny, haunting way, “Bullies” touches on the remarkable bonds of elementary school classmates, the very first people some of us encounter outside of our families and often the first friends we make.

In addition to its probing questions about the nature of memory, empathy and childhood, “Bullies” can be appreciated for its artful economy. Rosenblatt literally animates the film with a handful of surviving class pictures and uses archival educational and industrial footage to discuss general ideas about childhood and bullying.

There’s really only brief snippets of original footage, including the opening fence climb, a failed attempt to document a class reunion and an interview with his fifth grade teacher, now in her 90s, living in a senior center in the Bronx. While kind, she remains firmly in teacher mode when considering his obsession and his project. She has no recollection of the incident, suggesting that it’s important to Rosenblatt, “because it happened to YOU.” She’s even more frank when he says he’s making a film about the fateful afternoon. “That might be tedious,” she suggests.

“When We Were Bullies” was nominated for a 2021 Academy Award in the category of Documentary Short. This isn’t Rosenblatt’s first documentary rumination on the subject of male violence and cruelty — his 1994 short film “The Smell of Burning Ants” can be streamed on Kanopy.

› Host and designer Kim Wolfe helps homeowners escape renovation nightmares in the new series “Why the Heck Did I Buy This House?” (9 p.m., HGTV).

› Streaming on Discovery+, the documentary “Queen of Versailles Reigns Again” returns to the subject of a hit 2012 documentary, a symbol of housing excess, poor self-awareness and ghastly choices in decor and other more intimate forms of reconstruction.

OTHER HIGHLIGHTS

›

Marcel and Blake collaborate on a liver transplant on “Chicago Med” (8 p.m., NBC, TV-14).

› “Nature” (8 p.m., PBS, repeat) explores the behavior of squirrels.

› A cyber attack inspires old-school innovation on “Chicago Fire” (9 p.m., NBC, TV-14).

› A natural disaster floods the wards on “Good Sam” (10 p.m., CBS, TV-14).

› A team exercise doesn’t seem quite right on “Chicago P.D.” (10 p.m., NBC, TV-14).