While many people are familiar with John James Audubon’s remarkable series of paintings Birds of America, his “American Masters” (8 p.m., PBS, check local listings) biography, “Drawn From Nature,” reveals a larger-than-life character who reflects both the promise and excess of the young American nation.

Born illegitimate in Haiti in 1785, he and his French father barely escaped a bloody slave uprising. They decamped for France only to endure the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Audubon returned to the New World to escape being drafted into Napoleon’s army.

Audubon began concentrating his remarkable talents on painting and illustrating birds after decades of failed businesses and bankruptcy. His talent for art was exceeded only by his penchant for self-promotion, a trait that earned him scorn in the American scientific community. But like many American artists ignored in their own country, Audubon was discovered and embraced by Europeans who were fascinated by his unique combination of talent and well-rehearsed, rough-hewn manners and buckskin getup. As the narrator observes, Audubon became a kind of 19th-century rock star.

There is some irony in the title “Drawn From Nature,” because almost all of Audubon’s subjects were killed and mounted. It’s estimated that he killed tens of thousands of birds during his career.

By the end of his life, Audubon had become increasingly concerned about the wholesale destruction of America’s remarkable natural bounty. His early diaries describe the arrival of passenger pigeons over his Kentucky home. Pigeons, counted in the billions, darkened the skies for days as they passed. He describes an orgy of buckshot and blood as thousands of hunters shot millions of pigeons out of the sky. And even then he wondered whether the birds could ever be exhausted. For the record, Audubon died in 1851, and the passenger pigeon was declared extinct in 1914.

Tonight’s other highlights

¢ “The Pursuit of Excellence” (7 p.m., PBS, check local listings) profiles the members of the American team as they prepare for the International HairWorld Championships in Moscow, where more than 300 stylists from 40 countries compete in an event that has become known as the Hair Olympics.

¢ Victor Garber (“Titanic”) acts and sings in the role of a hippie Jesus in the 1973 musical “Godspell” (7 p.m., TCM), shot on location in New York City.

¢ Scheduled on “Dateline” (9 p.m., NBC): predators on the New Jersey shore.

¢ A question of balance on “Rescue Me” (9 p.m., FX).