“You could go in any direction, fast or slow as you wanted, fighting the wind if you felt like it, just on the strength of your feet and the courage of your lungs.” Jesse Owens’ description of running is surely poetic. Yet even as he found in running a means to express himself, to assert his independence and brilliance, the world around him remained unjust and odious. Jesse Owens—premiering on PBS’ American Experience on 1 May—recalls that world, as well as the athlete’s singular resistance to such injustice. It’s helpful to recall this dynamic now, at a time when athletes typically don’t take on such responsibility. As Laurens Grant’s elegant documentary points out, the responsibility was tremendous, as he traveled with the US Olympic team to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The bare bones of the outcome are well known now: Owens won four gold medals and Hitler refused to shake his hand. But the backstories to Owens’ triumphs on the track may be less familiar. And these stories, even those noted briefly here, demonstrate the complexity of the situations for Owens, the many “directions” he had to go, and the many winds he had to fight.

See PopMatters’ review.

Watch Jesse Owens Preview on PBS. See more from American Experience.

In high school, Pau Gasol pursued “unathletic interests.” So reports the episode of Real Sports, premiering on HBO 17 April, interests that included reading “countless books” and learning “Tchaikovsky on the piano… all while starring in basketball and dreaming of life as a pro.” The clip here shows a very young and sweet-faced Gasol blowing out birthday cake candles, before it cuts to Magic Johnson, whose announcement that he was HIV positive deeply affected the boy in Spain. “I was in shock,” the now 31-year-old Gasol tells Jon Frankel, and so he imagined himself entering the medical profession (his mother was a doctor and his father a nurse). His choice is now something like history, as is his brother Marc’s. Both were drafted by the NBA, Marc by the Lakers and Pau by the Grizzlies, and then became the first (and only, so far) brothers traded for one another.

It’s fair to say that Christmas specials have never been Doctor Who’s strong point. The festive season demands a certain level of whimsy and silliness that would smell a little too strongly of cheese at another time of year, tying up disparate plot threads in a disappointingly neat Yuletide package within the space of an hour. Inevitably, genuine drama is usually in short supply.

Last year’s edition – the first Christmas episode to star the 11th Doctor (Matt Smith)—even managed to, ahem, ‘rework’ A Christmas Carol, which is enough to bring out anyone’s inner Scrooge. After a disappointing and overly convoluted sixth series, it was difficult to expect too much from 2011’s effort. For all that, though, The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe somehow pulled off the tricky task of injecting magic into the annual special. A few loose ends and missed opportunities aside, this was by far the most successful of the seasonal episodes since the revitalised Who’s return in 2005.

“I’m the po-lice. I have my own set of rules, and I will impose my rules on them.” So announces Elijah Kane (Steven Seagal), New Orleans cop extraordinaire, in True Justice. He’s explaining his ethos to Hiro (Alex Mallari Jr.), the hapless CI (is there any other kind in such shows?), seated next to him as Kane drives to a next criminal encounter. Hiro responds as he must, nodding and smiling and insisting that his admiration for the man who busted him is profound. “You know my life’s changed ‘cause a you, Kane!”

The same might be said for so many who’ve been affected by Seagal, apparently forever hard to kill. (Think of all the fight choreography he pioneered, the full-body shots and long takes, the moves that influenced most action movies that came after the groundbreaking Above The Law [1988].) If he’s not quite the same action star as he was, Seagal remains a dominant screen presence, if only because he surrounds himself with much less compelling figures. In True Justice, which premieres 30 March on Reelz Channel, he’s the Wise Elder leading a team of beautiful youngsters, each a type you’ve seen in other versions of this formula. These kids pitch between arrogant and stupid: one takes long minutes to realize that a young mandarin-speaking victim has identified a cop as her parents’ killer: by the time the camera zooms close to Juliet’s (Meghan Ory) suddenly comprehending face, you’re ready to move on to the next case already.

By the fifth season of a series, no matter the pedigree of the showrunner or writing staff, a certain level of predictability sets in. Whether the series follows the careful formula of most procedurals (like CSI or virtually everything else on CBS), or the predictable unpredictability of more ambitious series (like The Walking Dead or Boardwalk Empire), we can begin to get a sense of where the writers will take us and how the actors will interpret their characters.

With the premiere date for the fifth season of Mad Men rapidly approaching, I want to put some of these predictions out there for your perusal. Some are locks, some are larks. Here goes: