What’s on TV Friday: ‘Son of Sam: The Killer Speaks’ and ‘Atypical’

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David Berkowitz, a.k.a. the Son of Sam, speaks out on the 40th anniversary of his arrest. And on Netflix, a teenager with autism goes in search of a girlfriend.

What’s on TV

SON OF SAM: THE KILLER SPEAKS 10 p.m. on CBS. From July 29, 1976, until his arrest on Aug. 10, 1977, David Berkowitz — a.k.a. the Son of Sam — terrorized New York City by killing six people and wounding seven others with a .44 caliber revolver, sometimes attacking couples in parked cars. In what is being billed as his only interview on the 40th anniversary of his arrest, Mr. Berkowitz, who is serving six consecutive life sentences at the Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Wallkill, N.Y., talks to Maurice DuBois about what led him to kill, his life before becoming a killer and his prison routine. “I see that people will never understand where I come from, no matter how much I try to explain it,” Mr. Berkowitz says. “They wouldn’t understand what it was like to walk in darkness.”

20/20 10 p.m. on ABC. On Wednesday, a jury found Molly Martens Corbett and her father, Thomas Martens, a former F.B.I. agent, guilty of second-degree murder in the killing of her husband, Jason Corbett, two years earlier at the couple’s home in North Carolina. This edition features pretrial interviews with both Ms. Corbett and Mr. Martens, who had claimed he bludgeoned Mr. Corbett after he found him choking his daughter.

What’s Streaming

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ATYPICAL on Netflix. Keir Gilchrist plays Sam, an 18-year-old high school senior on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum who is on a mission to find a girlfriend. Jennifer Jason Leigh is his overprotective mother, who wishes that someone, anyone — maybe the bartender? — would appreciate her. Michael Rapaport is his father, who can’t seem to wrap his mind around his son’s autism. And Brigette Lundy-Paine is his track-star sister, and a warrior for her brother. The biggest enemy of this new series — sort of a comedy and almost a drama — from Robia Rashid (“How I Met Your Mother”) might be the nerds and geeks already on television. “A viewer without a connection to the world of autism might be tempted to just put Sam into that pigeonhole,” Neil Genzlinger wrote in The New York Times. “The line between illuminating and trivializing is particularly thin here.”

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ADAPTATION (2002) on HBO streaming platforms. The director Spike Jonze and the writer Charlie Kaufman (along with his imaginary twin, Donald, who is also credited with the screenplay) journey into metafiction in this movie about the two Kaufmans (Nicolas Cage, in both roles) and Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), the writer for The New Yorker, whose book “The Orchid Thief” inspired the film. But watch it especially for Chris Cooper, who won an Oscar playing an orchid obsessive. “‘Adaptation’ is, most obviously, a movie about itself, as gleefully self-referential an exercise in auto-deconstruction as you could wish,” A. O. Scott wrote in The Times.

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