What’s on TV Sunday: ‘The Defiant Ones’ and ‘Amelia Earhart’

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Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine get the star treatment from HBO, while Alec Baldwin gets his own from Spike. And a recently discovered photograph may solve the mystery of what happened to the aviator Amelia Earhart as she tried to circumnavigate the globe in 1937.

What’s on TV

THE DEFIANT ONES 9 p.m. on HBO. Dr. Dre, the mastermind behind gangster rap, who introduced Snoop Dogg, Eminem and 50 Cent to the world; and Jimmy Iovine, a record producer for Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Nicks, who became one of the premier music executives of the 1990s and 2000s, get the biographical treatment, both individually and together. (They make headphones.) This “glossy, rapidly paced, ambitious and often fun” four-part documentary, Jon Caramanica wrote in The New York Times, has “a sufficient amount of awe at their history — which embodies the tremendous potential of American popular music and culture — but not an overwhelming, suffocating, corporate-endorsement amount. Instead, the mood is intimate, trusting, a little slick, making what could have been hagiography something more invigorating and frank.”

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ONE NIGHT ONLY: ALEC BALDWIN 9 p.m. on Spike. Mr. Baldwin basks — and occasionally squirms — in the limelight as Robert De Niro, Julianne Moore, Tracy Morgan, Jane Krakowski, Jack McBrayer and former President Bill Clinton lay their admiration on at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.

AMELIA EARHART: THE LOST EVIDENCE 9 p.m. on History. Shawn Henry, a former F.B.I. executive assistant director, reveals American documents that reportedly contain new information about the fate of the aviator Earhart, who went missing on July 2, 1937, with her navigator, Fred Noonan. At the heart of his theory: a photograph — presumably taken after their disappearance, at a dock in the Marshall Islands, and hidden in the National Archives — that suggests that the two were captured by the Japanese military and died in custody on Saipan.

What’s Streaming

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MELANCHOLIA (2011) on Amazon and iTunes. The Danish director Lars von Trier sets a celestial apocalypse to blasts of Wagner as Justine (Kirsten Dunst), a bride whose depression sabotages her wedding and marriage, and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), her sister, await the impact of a rogue planet with Earth. Alexander Skarsgard portrays Justine’s husband; Charlotte Rampling and John Hurt are her divorced parents. “Mr. von Trier, inspired (if that’s the word) to make this movie by his own experience of depression, gleefully turns a psychological drama inside out,” A. O. Scott wrote in The Times.

SLIDING DOORS (1998) on Amazon. Will she make or miss her subway train? Gwyneth Paltrow plays Helen, a comely Londoner who, depending on those pesky doors, may or may not sit next to a stranger, James (John Hannah), and strike up a conversation, only to return home to find her boyfriend (John Lynch) in bed with his ex-girlfriend (Jeanne Tripplehorn). “In any case, there’s no real doubt about Helen’s rosy future,” Stephen Holden wrote in The Times of Peter Howitt’s rom-com.

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