Considered by many to be the very first narrative movie, the 15-minute feature “The Great Train Robbery” entranced audiences in 1903, and people have been watching cops and robbers ever since.

“Cops” remains the granddaddy of reality television and is still running on Fox after nearly 20 years. Cops and robbers, crime and punishment: How do you improve on that basic theme?

The reality series “Manhunters: Fugitive Task Force” (9 p.m., A&E) adds little to the genre, but it does feature a few memorable real-life characters with Brooklyn and Bronx accents as thick as a pastrami sandwich.

Based in New York but called to action all over the country, the task force goes after the most dangerous criminals at large. They were part of the hunt for the Washington sniper, and tonight they go from Brooklyn to Los Angeles after the ringleader of a gang called the Jamaican Spray Posse, an organization that touts more than 1,400 homicides.

Big-budget movies and shows tend to glamorize police work as a loud and precise ballet of interdependent actors and agencies each meshing with perfect timing.

Real life doesn’t work like that. In “Manhunters,” we see agents crowd around a hotel-room door with guns drawn and adrenaline pumping. Then the chief announces that his electronic room key doesn’t work. “It doesn’t flash green,” he complains. It’s an almost comic anticlimax, so very unlike a scene out of “24.”

Later, we see a convoy of SUVs try to ferry agents to a showdown in the same hotel lobby. But they have to make a U-turn and cross six lanes of highway to get there.

As noted above, the verities of police dramas have endured for more than a century. Crime does not pay. And traffic can be murder.

• “Independent Lens” (9 p.m., PBS, check local listings) presents the documentary “Doc,” a profile of novelist Harold Louis “Doc” Humes (“Men Die”), who co-founded the Paris Review and whose troubled life and descent into paranoia mirrored his times. The film was produced by his daughter.

• DVDs available today include the complete-series edition of “The Wire.”

Tonight’s other highlights

• When a commercial network airs a film like “Pulp Fiction” (6 p.m., AMC), it has to make so many cuts and dub so much profane dialogue and delete so many scenes that it almost becomes an entirely different movie.

• A teen collapses during a Christmas pageant on “House” (7 p.m., Fox).

• A fatal bus accident presents a gruesome puzzle on “Fringe” (8 p.m., Fox).

• The surfing scene can be murder on “The Mentalist” (8 p.m., CBS).

• “Frontline” (8 p.m., PBS, check local listings) repeats the special “Can You Afford to Retire?” The number of people answering “no” has increased since this first aired in 2006.

• A lottery winner vanishes on “Without a Trace” (9 p.m., CBS).

• A series of victims suffer similar memory loss on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” (9 p.m., NBC).

• A dream’s conflicting message confuses a case on “Eli Stone” (9 p.m., ABC).

• The lazy feline kicks back on a “Garfield Christmas Special” (9:30 p.m., Family).