Best Bets on TV Tonight

During the 2000 presidential campaign, filmmaker/journalist Alexandra Pelosi spent 18 months essentially stalking George W. Bush with a video camera. The result was "Journeys With George," a delightfully offbeat and critically acclaimed documentary that offered a revealing portrait of the man who would go on to win the closest, most controversial election in American history. For her encore performance, "Diary of a Political Tourist" (8 p.m., HBO), the youngest daughter of House minority leader Nancy Pelosi packed up her camera again and spent two years on the Democratic campaign trail -- from the candidates' announcements, through the early primaries, to Super Tuesday and the convention. Though "Diary" doesn't offer the same kind of personality insights as "Journeys" -- John Kerry and John Edwards were much too guarded to let their hair down -- it does reveal all the exhaustion, the pain, the shame, the tedium, the ego and the absurdity that go into running for president.
"The Third Man" (8 p.m., TCM) was director Carol Reed's landmark film, set in post-World War II Vienna. It stars Orson Welles as the villainous Harry Lime and Joseph Cotten as a onetime friend searching for him. Followed by "Shadowing the Third Man" (10 p.m.), a documentary about the making of this unlikely classic.