Tube Notes

By Mike Hughes
Gannett News Service

Tonight's must-see

• Basketball, 3 and 8 p.m., CBS. It's the NCAA championship game from New Orleans. Expect a commotion.

• "Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story," 6 and 8 p.m., Lifetime. Here is the season's best TV movie. Peter Levin directed beautifully, getting a stunning performance from young Thora Birch ("American Beauty"). Ronni Kern wrote a great script from a true story. Liz Murray's mother was crumbling from drug addiction and AIDS; her brilliant father faded into a mental fog.

She ran away from foster homes and found places — stairwells and subways — to sleep. She kept her homelessness secret when she returned to school; there, she did four years' schooling in two, got a scholarship and reached Harvard. There are terrific performances by Kelly Lynch and Michael Riley as Murray's parents and Makyla Smith as her friend. And there is Birch, offering rich layers of love, despair and resolve.

Of note

• "Boston Public," 7 p.m., FOX. Ronnie (Jeri Ryan) gets credit for the school's new exam scores. She also faces a romantic crisis with Zach.

• "Everybody Loves Raymond," 7:30 p.m., CBS. This moves up a half-hour to make room for basketball. In this rerun, Ray is nudged into being a stricter disciplinarian.

• "American Experience: Daughter from Danang," 9 p.m., PBS. As the Vietnam War ended, Vietnamese children of mixed-race heritage seemed endangered. Mai Thi Kim put her 7-year-old daughter, Mai Thi Hiep, on an "Operation Babylift" plane to the United States.

Some 22 years later, filmmakers planned to follow the joyous reunion of mother and daughter. What they found was something much deeper. After a painful childhood, Heidi (formerly Hiep) is married, with two children. Her return to Vietnam brings rich layers of emotion in this Oscar-nominated documentary.