The very title “Bernard and Doris” (7 p.m. today, HBO) suggests a quiet domesticity, a tale of a couple of homebodies grown used to each other’s rhythms and quirks. And that’s not entirely wrong. This made-for-TV drama is based on the much-reported story of billionaire heiress Doris Duke (Susan Sarandon) and her butler, Bernard Lafferty (Ralph Fiennes).

Lafferty’s name figured prominently in Duke’s will, and some suspect that he slowly killed her with drugs as he kept her isolated from the outside world.

That tabloid version of events was reflected in the 1999 CBS miniseries “Too Rich: The Secret Life of Doris Duke,” starring Lauren Bacall as Duke and Richard Chamberlain as a wicked, cackling Lafferty. In my review, I compared Chamberlain to “a silent-movie villain.”

Based on fact, fiction and speculation, “Bernard and Doris” builds rather slowly and offers an entirely different view.

Jobless in 1987, Lafferty arrives for an interview, and Duke puts him right to work. Only much later does she check his references to discover that he worked for Liz Taylor and Peggy Lee. A reformed alcoholic, Lafferty treads lightly around Duke’s tantrums, lovers and binges.

As Duke grows to depend on Lafferty, she also wonders what he’s after. She’s spent her life being used and pursued by men lusting for her money and her body, so she can’t quite understand her servant’s undying if understated devotion.

If you’re looking for zippy action and pat insights, then skip “Bernard and Doris.” It’s not exactly honest to call this movie a romance. Think of it as something exquisite and sad. It’s a nuanced meditation on shared isolation and muted desires that demonstrates – at a slow and deliberate pace – how mutual affection and unhealthy dependencies can settle into something resembling love.

¢ The two-hour special “Six Degrees Could Change the World” (7 p.m. Sunday, National Geographic) goes spanning the globe to demonstrate how atmospheric warming has already wrought climate change. The film then looks at how a 1-degree increase in the global temperature would affect life on Earth – then what 2 degrees would bring, then 3, 4, etc.

The visions are not pretty. According to scientists interviewed here, it won’t take much of an increase to turn some of the extreme weather aberrations of recent years into “normal” events. “Six” documents the 2007 brush fire epidemic in Australia, the deadly European heat wave of 2003 and killer storms like Katrina as harbingers of bad things to come.

Experts then tick off evidence that shows how more extreme climate change could turn America’s breadbasket into a vast desert, destroy the subtropical rainforests and turn the oceans into an acidic sewer.

Tonight’s highlights

¢ Based on a popular Web site, “Petfinder” (8 p.m., Animal Planet) finds homes and families for shelter animals.

¢ On two helpings of “48 Hours Mystery” (CBS), a deadly pageant (8 p.m.), a missing-child scam (9 p.m.).

¢ A visitor from the trenches of 1918 on “Torchwood” (8 p.m., BBC America).

Sunday’s highlights

¢ Scheduled on “60 Minutes” (6 p.m., CBS): Separate interviews with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama; Is the U.S. mint getting nickeled and dimed by the cost of minting small change?

¢ Musicians perform and salute their own on the 50th Annual Grammy Awards (7 p.m., CBS).

¢ Can’t wait for the Oscars? Watch their U.K. equivalent, the British Academy Television Awards (7 p.m., BBC America).