Should the Miss America Pageant (7 p.m., today, TLC) be put out of its misery? If there’s anything worse than a world without Miss America, it’s a world where the once beloved and highly rated contest has been reduced to buzz-free irrelevance, little more than a promotional opportunity for a Las Vegas hotel and a chance for Mario Lopez to host his 4,000th cable special.

It would be easy to blame changing attitudes for the pageant’s decline. A feminist march on Atlantic City in 1968 was seen as one of the opening salvos of the modern women’s movement. Some contend that Miss America has never recovered.

But why has it withered when other spectacles (Like Donald Trump’s glitzier Miss USA and Miss Universe) endure? There are simply more pageants (and more cable shows catering to contestants, parents and coaches) than ever.

Perhaps Miss America has waned because it has tried to remain above the fray and in the middle of the road in an entertainment universe where the center cannot hold.

Pageant culture and its appreciation is divided between true believers — those who devote their lives and fortunes to tiaras — and those who treat the whole spectacle as a camp riot and a chance for irony-drenched snark. The two worlds collided and exploded last April when the caustic online gossip columnist Perez Hilton served as a Miss USA judge and posed a loaded question to the infamously witless Carrie Prejean. The rest, as they say, is tabloid history.

In trying to navigate these vulgar extremes, Miss America has become a lukewarm glass of flat soda that not even Mario Lopez can effervesce. It’s sad to say that Miss America is fading fast and is likely to expire, not with a bang, but a whimper.

• The “Nature” (7 p.m., Sunday, PBS, check local listings) presentation “Wild Balkans” offers a different take on a war-torn region, and along the way tries to redeem the Balkans from its place in both history and the popular imagination.

A blood-soaked battleground ravaged by Christian crusaders and Ottoman occupiers, the Balkan have remained a place of bloodshed as late as the civil wars of the 1990s. “Wild Balkans” puts the emphasis on its natural treasures. Home to ragged mountains and some of the oldest forests and most pristine wetlands in Europe, it endures as an alluring if spooky backwater, a place where wild wolves, brown bears and the continent’s few remaining mountain Lynx still roam unmolested.

The narration offers conjecture that J.R.R. Tolkien may have been inspired by the rugged mountains and forests of Bulgaria, Montenegro and Croatia when he created his “Lord of the Rings” novels, set in a mythical Middle Earth.

The film makes much of the “Rings” comparison, offering lavish scenery both haunting beautiful — all without the benefit of computer graphics or special effects.

• The NFL deserves congratulations for moving the Pro Bowl (6:20 p.m., Sunday, ESPN) to the week before the Super Bowl, a time when interest in the game remains red hot.

This chance for the best players in the AFC and NFC to play for bragging rights used to be consigned to the week after the big game, when potential viewers have long since been exhausted by Super Bowl ballyhoo. Marketing the Pro Bowl after the Super Bowl is a little like selling champagne on Jan. 2.

For obvious reasons, players from the Super Bowl-bound Colts and Saints will not participate. But interest in the game should run high. Football has been a ratings tear during a season when every network has seen declines. Last week’s NFC championship was a treat for fans and Fox alike. A close, high-scoring shootout that had to be settled in overtime, the Saints-Vikings contest attracted more than 50 million viewers at some point during the game. Not even “American Idol” can say that.

Today’s highlights

• Keri Russell and Skeet Ulrich star in the 2005 made-for-TV romance “Magic of Ordinary Days” (7 p.m., CBS).

• “Truth in Motion: The US Ski Team’s Road to Vancouver” (7 p.m., NBC) profiles Olympics hopefuls.

• The city by the bay attracts destructive visitors from outer space in the 2010 shocker “Meteor Storm” (8 p.m., SyFy).

Sunday’s highlights

• Scheduled on “60 Minutes” (6 p.m., CBS): training Afghan forces; profiles of Beyonce and Shaun White

• The 52nd annual Grammy Awards (7 p.m., CBS) salutes the best music of 2009.

• “Emma” continues on “Masterpiece Mystery” (8 p.m., PBS, check local listings, part 2 of 3).

• A bigamist soap opera bogs down in politics and accounting on “Big Love” (8 p.m., HBO).