Worth Watching: Baseball All-Star Game, ‘Aftershock’ on Hulu, Inside ‘American Pie’ (the Song), Back to ‘Love Island’

8/7c

Can the National League break the American League’s eight-game win streak? Fans of the Great American Pastime will find out when the best players from each league face off in the annual match-up, broadcast live from L.A.’s Dodger Stadium.

Documentary Premiere

Starting small, with the tragic stories of two Black women who died during or shortly after childbirth of preventable causes, this impassioned documentary expands to reveal the disproportionate maternal mortality rate for Black women as well as an alarming reliance in the medical hospital establishment for C-sections. The initial focus of Aftershock is on the fathers and families left behind after these tragedies, bonding to form a network demanding systemic change through a birth justice movement. “A Black woman having a baby is like a Black man at a traffic stop with the police,” says a woman from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the mortality rate is twice the national average. We watch her bypass the hospital system to receive personal tender care from dulas at a local birthing center. (Aftershock also provides an eye-opening history of midwifery’s evolution to the fringes of American medicine.)

Documentary Premiere

“American Pie” is one of those songs that instantly burrowed its way into pop-culture earworm history, but whose lyrics have been the subject of speculation since it was released in the early 1970s. In a 90-minute documentary, songwriter Don McLean provides answers as he describes the song’s genesis and interprets the words to address misconceptions, while putting “American Pie” in its proper social and political context. Key to the documentary is the actual “day the music died” in 1959 when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and “Big Bopper” J.P. Richardson perished in a plane crash.

Season Premiere

After three seasons on CBS, the trashy hook-up hoedown moves to streaming with episodes dropping six days a week. (Even the oversexed deserve a day of rest, apparently.) The premiere, hosted by Modern Family’s Sarah Hyland and narrated by U.K. comedian Iain Stirling, introduces a new group of island inhabitants who are repeatedly tempted to dump their current partner for sexy new arrivals. The home audience also gets to choose who stays and goes from the exotic villa on the California coast.

10/9c

Once again nominated for a Best Comedy Emmy, the uproarious vampire spoof is in a tizzy over the opening of Nadja’s (Natasia Demetriou) self-named nightclub—but her opening night is imperiled when the star attraction, the undead music star Richie Suck (Affion Crockett), backs out. (Fred Armisen guests as his overprotective familiar.) In other developments, Nandor (Kayvan Novak) consults his devious Djinn (Anoop Desai) for self-improvement modifications, and Laszlo (Matt Berry) is dismayed to learn Baby Colin (Mark Proksch) has an affinity for musical theater: “No boy of mine is going to be a pasty-faced musical theater nut with a Sondheim lyric for every occasion.” Sounds OK to me.

The hit mystery-comedy, nominated for 17 Emmys for its first season, continues its second season with a particularly strong showcase for Selena Gomez (somehow not nominated) as Mabel, who invites her new art crowd to a party, where a party game could help reveal a liar in their midst.

• Tom Swift (9/8c, The CW): In one of the few remaining episodes of the Nancy Drew spinoff, Tom (Tian Richards) grows closer to guardian angel Rowan (Albert Mwangi) after answering his call for help to rescue a missing scientist who may have been abducted by the anti-tech cabal behind a Swift family tragedy.
• Jaws Invasion (10/9c, National Geographic): User-generated footage reveals how sharks are encroaching on our own turf—swimming pools, golf courses, lakes and keys—in the latest SharkFest special.
• Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel (10/9c, HBO): Topics in this edition of the monthly sports newsmagazine include a bird-watching competition in New Jersey, a behind-the-scenes report from Japan on Sumo wrestling and Mary Carillo’s profile of sports-mascot pioneer Dave (the “Philly Phanatic”) Raymond.
• The Great Muslim American Road Trip (10/9c, PBS, check local listings at pbs.org): In the final leg of their three-week pilgrimage across Route 66 from Chicago to California, Mona Haydar and her husband Sebastian Robins make stops at the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas’ Muslim Village, then learn about a famous Syrian camel driver employed by the U.S. Army pre-Civil War.
• David A. Arnold: It Ain’t for the Weak (streaming on Netflix): The comedian performs a stand-up set focused on the foibles of family from his Cleveland hometown.
• A Dark, Dark Man (streaming on MHz Choice): An award-winning noir drama from Kazakhstan follows a jaded young policeman and a female journalist confronting a corrupt justice system as they pursue the killer of a small boy.