“Ron Howard: 50 Years in Film” (7 p.m., TCM) allows the actor and director to offer short anecdotes about his many movie and TV projects dating back to the time when he was only 3 years old.

Howard, whose new film “Frost/Nixon” has received much acclaim, has worked with many notable stars, some more than once. The list includes Tom Hanks (“Splash,” “Apollo 13” and “The Da Vinci Code”); Gary Sinise (“Ransom” and “Apollo 13”); Henry Winkler (“Happy Days” and “Night Shift”) and Michael Keaton (“Night Shift” and “The Paper”). He also cast Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman together in “Far and Away” before they were married.

But who remembers that Howard worked with Bette Davis? We see clips from “Skyward,” a 1980 made-for-TV movie starring Davis as an aging barnstormer who teaches a wheelchair-bound girl to fly. The veteran actress insisted on calling the fledgling director “Mr. Howard” until she decided that she liked and respected him. The moment she called him “Ron” was a personal and professional breakthrough. Howard offers similar insights and stories about the inspirations behind his films and relates lessons he learned from them all.

The documentary, directed by Richard Schickel, presents Howard alone in front of the camera, answering an interviewer’s questions, but we never see or hear anyone else. This awkward touch turns the interview into a monologue that makes the still boyish filmmaker look more presumptuous and professorial than he probably intended.

In addition to “50 Years,” TCM presents “Grand Theft Auto” (9:30 p.m), Howard’s debut as a director, made for the budget producer Roger Corman. Howard’s 2001 drama “A Beautiful Mind” (1 a.m.), starring Russell Crowe, also airs.

• Chris Matthews looks at the legacy of president George W. Bush in “The Decider: A Hardball Documentary” (4 p.m. and 6 p.m., MSNBC).

• “Great Performances at the Met” (8 p.m., PBS, check local listings) presents “Doctor Atomic,” an operatic biography of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb who was later caught up in the McCarthy era.

• “Le Cirque: A Table in Heaven” (8 p.m., HBO) takes a documentary look at an expensive Manhattan restaurant that was one of the most hard-to-get reservations in town from 1974 until it closed in 2004. The film looks at the family behind the institution and the preparations behind its 2006 reopening.

• VH1 takes the nostalgia machine and turns it up to “11” with “100 Greatest Hard Rock Songs” (9 p.m., VH1) airing nightly through Friday.

Tonight’s other highlights

• Follow the fishing fleet on a 14-hour marathon of “Deadliest Catch” (10 a.m. through 2 a.m.) episodes.

• Home is where the holiday clips are found on “Greatest Holiday Moments: Hilarious Home Video Countdown” (7 p.m., NBC).

• A struggling artist gets strange visions on “House” (7 p.m., Fox).

• Johnny Depp stars in the 2003 adventure “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” (7 p.m., ABC).

• The corpse of a reality TV host is discovered in an outhouse on “Bones” (8 p.m., Fox).

• Catch six episodes of “South Park” (8 p.m. to 11 p.m., Comedy Central).

Cult choice

Pilots and stewardesses swing during the golden age of airline flight in the 1965 comedy “Boeing, Boeing” (2:30 p.m., TCM), starring Tony Curtis, Jerry Lewis and Thelma Ritter.