While many networks seem to be slowing down to repeat mode for the holidays, TNT has been broadcasting new episodes of “The Closer” (8 p.m., TNT) in December. Tonight’s installment brings Kyra Sedgwick’s Deputy Police Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson in conflict with her departmental nemesis, Capt. Raydor (Mary McDonnell, “Dances With Wolves,” “Battlestar Galactica”).

Raydor fumes when Brenda seems to handle charges of domestic violence against a female officer with a little too much discretion. Things really get touchy when Brenda’s go-slow approach appears to result in a tragedy. Meanwhile, things aren’t exactly peachy on Brenda’s own domestic front when her husband, Fritz (Jon Tenney), feels shut out of her work-obsessed world.

It’s hard to blame him. Brenda shows a lot more sizzle feuding with Raydar than she does during her perfunctory dinners with Fritz over reheated leftovers. Sedgwick and McDonnell really seem to have a blast getting on each other’s nerves.

• “Rufus Wainwright: Prima Donna” (8 p.m., Sundance) offers a profile of the young singer-songwriter and follows his ambitious efforts to write and stage an original classical opera.

As opera singer Renee Fleming and others observe, this is an outrageously courageous undertaking, given the fact that Wainwright has scant classical training and is better known as an eccentric and fiercely independent pop artist. One of his composing collaborators simply calls it “mad.”

His parents, folk artist Loudon Wainwright III and Canadian singer Kate McGarrigle, who divorced when he was 3, appear here to discuss and praise his remarkable creativity and precocity. The elder Wainwright plays the somewhat bewildered straight dad, looking like a combination of William Hurt and Craig T. Nelson as he describes his son as a “flamboyant toddler.”

His mother recalls him as an eager 8-year-old rooting through her LP collection to play operas she didn’t know she owned. We see home videos of an adolescent Wainwright staging “Tosca” with his cousins and friends.

It remains to be seen whether Wainwright’s French-language opera “Prima Donna” will be one for the ages or merely an ambitious folly by an artist who has always followed his own highly developed and idiosyncratic instincts.

Tonight’s other highlights

• The winning group emerges on “The Sing-Off” (7 p.m., NBC) and wins a $100,000 prize.

• A know-it-all patient posts his symptoms online on “House” (7 p.m., Fox).

• The Peanuts gang returns with the 2003 special “I Want a Dog For Christmas, Charlie Brown!” (7 p.m., ABC).

• Experts spend three hours pondering the question “Who Was Jesus?” (7 p.m., Discovery).

• A murder witness exhibits several personalities on “Lie to Me” (8 p.m., Fox).

• A reality TV bachelorette is found slain on “CSI: Miami” (9 p.m., CBS).

• A fake vampire is found really most sincerely dead on “Castle” (9 p.m., ABC).

• Joe tries to bond with his son over golf on “Men of a Certain Age” (9 p.m., TNT).

Cult choice

John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd star in the cynical 1979 farce “1941” (8:35 p.m., Encore), an epic sendup of wartime fears that the Japanese would attack Los Angeles. A major misfire for director Steven Spielberg, who would return to World War II with “Empire of the Sun,” “Always,” “Shindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan.”