Tuesday's Best Bets on TV

“The Choice” (9 p.m., PBS): “Frontline” first aired a profile of presidential candidates during the 1988 race, and “The Choice” has been a quadrennial part of “Frontline’s” political coverage ever since. Now “The Choice 2008” examines the journeys of Barack Obama and John McCain in a two-hour special at 9 p.m. on PBS. The saga begins at the Democratic Convention four years ago when Obama, a little-known candidate for U.S. Senate, galvanizes his listeners with his call for the nation to move beyond partisan politics. “All around were people with tears in their eyes,” Obama’s chief political adviser David Axelrod recalls, “and I realized at that moment that his life would never be the same.” Then, at the Republican Convention, self-described maverick McCain defends the national security policy of the Bush administration, with which he had sometimes clashed in the Senate. For McCain, the goal was “to make himself more acceptable to the party base without completely surrendering his outsider independent persona,” says Mark McKinnon, a member of his inner circle, “and that was a very complex balancing act.” The long road that has brought these challengers to the campaign’s home stretch is retraced by “The Choice.”

“The Mentalist” (9 p.m., CBS): Viewers apparently are on the same wavelength as “The Mentalist,” which has become the first bona-fide new hit of the season. Tonight, Patrick Jane (Simon Baker) investigates the death of a young woman whose body washed up on a beach.