Time never stands still, and family always gets you in the end. Those two mottos could be embroidered on two Monday-night series, one soaring, the other declining, but both memorable in their own way.

Once the best guy soap opera on television, “24” (8 p.m., Fox) seems to have returned to the same well too many times. For all the firepower and technology and political juice its characters wield, they’re almost always undone by those closest to them. Last season, President Taylor (Cherry Jones) had to send her own daughter to prison, and a few years back, the great Nixonian weasel President Logan (Gregory Itzin) survived one intrigue after another only to be stabbed by his wife (Jean Smart).

Over on “Damages” (9 p.m., FX), the struggles and the woundings are similarly intimate in nature. To say the Madoff-like Louis Tobin (Len Cariou) and his son, Joe (Campbell Scott), have issues is an understatement. It’s bad enough when Dad swindles the world and ruins the family name. But when Dad beds down with his son’s old girlfriend and then puts a deadly tail on his son, then we’re getting someplace.

The weirdness reverberates down the generations, too. A great scene in last week’s episode had echoes of both “The Godfather” and “Children of the Corn,” when Joe had to explain to his own son about the nature of his grandfather’s betrayal and the difference between doing something bad and being intrinsically evil.

The Tobins are not the only ones with problems. Patty’s own son is keeping weird secrets, and who can blame him after the way she kicked his father to the curb? Ellen’s (Rose Byrne) repressed New Jersey family will probably not take it well when they discover her sister’s drug habit. And what about poor Tom Shayes (Tate Donavan)? With the show’s time-tripping narrative, we already know that he ends up dead six months hence. But, perhaps in a fate worse than death, he has to break it to his in-laws that his investment advice has left them penniless.

• A repeat “American Experience” (8 p.m., PBS, check local listings) profiles aviator Amelia Earhart, a figure portrayed in two 2009 movies, the biography “Amelia” and the special-effects romp “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.”

Tonight’s other highlights

• Ice dancing takes center stage at the Winter Olympics (7 p.m., NBC). Women’s hockey coverage (4 p.m., CNBC) continues elsewhere.

• A downwardly mobile physicist appears beyond help on “House” (7 p.m., Fox).

• TNT gambles that men of a certain age would rather watch three hours of “Men of a Certain Age” (7 p.m., TNT) than ice dancing.

• A swindler’s murder produces a surplus of suspects on “CSI: Miami” (9 p.m., CBS).