Lethal Weapon

AMC, 7 p.m.

While five years earlier Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte had paved the way for the modern era of “buddy cop” movies that paired action with some humor with their film 48 Hrs., it was 1987’s Lethal Weapon that took the genre to a new and oftenimitated (even by its own three sequels) level. Danny Glover plays Roger Murtaugh, an LAPD detective who has just turned 50, is close to retirement and is, as he likes to remind people, “Getting too old for this @#$%.” Mel Gibson, who had already been established as an action star at the time thanks to the initial Mad Max films, forged a new iconic action character for himself as Martin Riggs, the apparently unstable partner assigned to a reluctant Murtaugh. The actors’ chemistry is great as the men feel each other out and begin to understand each other while they work to bring down the bad guys. Those bad guys are former Special Ops forces who are now smuggling heroin into the country, led by creepy characters like Gary Busey’s brutally psychotic Mr. Joshua, one of the most memorable of the ’80s action-movie villains.