The Week’s guide to what’s worth watching

last updated 8 January 2015

Nature: My Bionic Pet

These are not your average house pets and zoo creatures. See how dogs in need of legs, a swan with a deformed beak, and even an alligator that lost its tail in a fight have benefited from recent advances in prosthetic technology. Wednesday, April 9, at 8 p.m., PBS; check local listings

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Ronald Reagan got it right when he dubbed Libya’s longtime dictator “the mad dog of the Middle East.” Former associates of the toppled leader validate that epithet by sharing horrific tales about women he held as sex slaves and enemies he had tortured and killed. There’s even a claim that he ordered a Libyan passenger plane shot down in 1992 in a convoluted attempt to pin the resulting deaths on sanctions imposed by the international community. Friday, April 11, at 9 p.m., Showtime

The bombings at last year’s Boston Marathon triggered a massive manhunt that made unprecedented use of modern surveillance technology. This two-hour special revisits the horror of the event through interviews with eyewitnesses and re-creates the successful investigation with help from Boston officials, including then-Mayor Thomas Menino and current Police Commissioner William B. Evans. Sunday, April 13, at 9 p.m., National Geographic

What a startup: Mike Judge’s new comedy series is shaping up to bea spot-on send-up of the tech world’s haves and wannabes, its laughs generated mostly by a group of misfit coders holed up in a “hacker hostel” while trying to develop the next new thing. In the series premiere, a Mark Zuckerberg–like whiz kid (Thomas Middleditch) is yanked into a dizzying bidding war when industry players learn of a music-compression algorithm he’s created. In episode two, he has to decide what friends are worth. Sunday, April 13, at 10 p.m., HBO

To tackle “the biggest story of our time,” a team of celebrity correspondents has fanned out across the planet to explore the threats posed by global warming. Working under executive producers James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger, a riled-up Harrison Ford carries the first of the series’s nine episodes, traveling to Indonesia to investigate corporate-driven deforestation. In future episodes, Jessica Alba, America Ferrara, and columnist Thomas Friedman get in on the action. Sunday, April 13, at 10 p.m., Showtime