The Parade Preview: What to Watch, Rent or Buy Oct. 3 – Oct. 9

All times Eastern.

MONDAY, OCT. 3
Timeless
In the season pilot of this new series, an unlikely team—a history professor (Abigail Spencer), a soldier (Matt Lanter) and a scientist (Malcolm Barrett)—is tasked with traveling backward through time to stop a criminal mastermind disrupting key moments in American history (10 p.m., NBC).

Yours, Mine or Ours
Real estate agent Reza Rarahan and decorator Taylor Spellman help couples living under separate roofs—before getting engaged or married—figure out which residence they should call home in this new half-hour series (10 p.m., Bravo).

TUESDAY, OCT. 4
Trailblazing Women
Bette Midler, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno and Dana Delaney share co-hosting duties of this 40-film salute to actresses, kicking off tonight with silent film star Mary Pickford plus Lucille Ball and Mary Tyler Moore and continuing every Tuesday and Thursday throughout the month of October with tributes to Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Katharine Hepburn, Shirley Temple, Barbra Streisand and many more (6 p.m., TCM).

Game of Homes
Host Cameron Mathison from Entertainment Tonight, Dancing With the Stars and All My Children guides four teams of amateur home builders as they attempt to save dilapidated houses marked for tear-down and revive them room-by-room into dream homes (9 p.m., Discovery Family Channel).

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 5
Expedition Unknown: Hunt for the Yeti
Is the Yeti—the so-called abominable snowman believed to roam the Himalayas—real? This four-week special event kicks off tonight to find the truth behind centuries of legends, lore and eyewitness accounts with new insight, high-tech investigation and expert insight (9 p.m., Travel Channel).

Clash of the Corps
This eight-part series crisscrosses the country to document the intense competition between two all-star teams, the Cadets from Pennsylvania and the Blue Devils of Northern California, as they compete once again in the highly competitive Drum Corps International world championships event in Indianapolis, Ind. (11 p.m., Fuse).

THURSDAY, OCT. 6
Monsters Inside Me
The frightening fan-favorite series about tiny terrors plaguing unsuspecting victims returns with more terrifying tales of microscopic monsters, including a woman who finds her breast implant has developed mold and a man whose hand bone is growing a barnacle (10 p.m., Animal Planet).

Those Who Can’t
Saturday Night Live alum Cheri Oteri joins the cast as the new principal of Denver’s Smoot High for season two as the show’s trio of trouble-making teachers (also the creators and exec producers, Adam Cayton-Holland, Andrew Orvedahl and Ben Roy) struggle to deal with the shakeup (10:30 p.m., TruTV).

FRIDAY, OCT. 7
Hawaii Five-0
When FBI profiler Alicia Brown (Claire Forlani) finds a body in her bed, she joins McGarrett (Alex O’Loughlin) in his hunt for the “chess-piece killer” (10 p.m., CBS).

My Life is a Telenova
Follow the lives—and loves—of a group of young, hard-working Hispanic actresses and actors in sun-kissed Miami working in the hyper-competitive world of Telenovas, a TV genre which has continued to entertain audiences all over the world for decades (10 p.m., WE tv).

SATURDAY, OCT. 8
All-Star Halloween Spectacular
Stars from the Food Network, HGTV and the Travel Channel team up for an ultimate Halloween adventure in the heart of Las Vegas as Drew Scott and Tia Mowry compete against Jonathan Scott and Duff Goldman to create a pair of life-size haunted houses and over-the-top desserts to wing a prize for the winning team’s charity of choice (8 p.m., Food Network).

NASCAR Sprint Cup: Charlotte
Engines will roar and sparks will fly in the only Saturday night race in the “the Chase,” as the NASCAR Sprint Cup championship series is called, for the 57^th running of the fall classic in Charlotte, N.C. (11 p.m., NBC).

SUNDAY, OCT. 9
Won’t Back Down
Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis star in this powerful drama—inspired by real events—as determined mothers who’ll stop at nothing to transform their children’s failing inner-city school (8 p.m., National Geographic Channel).

Insecure
Issa Rae, creator of the popular YouTube series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, and her friend Molly (Yvonne Orji) are L.A. career women navigating race, gender and relationships in this new semi-autobiographical half-hour comedy series (10:30 p.m., HBO).

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Brooklyn-born photographer Sante D’Orazio certainly knew how to get his subjects to open up, in sensual, soft, personal portraits that defined much of 1990s celebrity glamour. But many of his best “moments” were captured before the official shoot began, when warm-up instant prints were being clicked off as test shots. Polaroids (Chronicle), a collection of D’Orazio’s celebrity images, includes supermodels, rock idols and movie stars, all looking their laid-back best.

Turn it up! In Marshall: The Book of Loud (Hachette), Nick Harper collects all sorts of sonic facts and figures—brought to you by Marshall amps, favored since the early 1960s by just about every musician on the planet—in a wonderfully wide-ranging roundup of the loudest bands of all time, banned records, punk rock vocabulary, where to find deceased rock stars, 11 karaoke songs to avoid, legends of loud, face furniture (rock whiskers), the longest guitar solos and much, much more!

NEW ON DVD

Well, color me purple! The new Prince Movie Collection (Warner Bros. Home Entertainment) commemorates the film career of the late singer, songwriter and actor with his three starring roles in Purple Rain plus its sequel Graffiti Bridge and Under the Cherry Moon, both making their Blu-ray debut. Bonus features include a visit to the Minneapolis nightclub where Prince got his start; a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Purple Rain; the original MTV broadcast of the movie’s premiere party; and music videos for soundtrack songs including “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Take Me With U,” “When Doves Cry” and “I Would Die 4 U.”

Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood portray two sisters fighting for survival when a widespread power outage plunges the world into chaos in Into the Forest (Lionsgate Home Entertainment), based on the apocalyptic novel by Jean Hegland.

In the acclaimed—and unusual— Swiss Army Man (Lionsgate Home Entertainment) by the filmmaking duo of Daniel Scheinert and Danial Kwan, Paul Dano plays a man stranded alone on a tropical island whose situation changes when a corpse (Daniel Radcliffe) washes ashore. It’s even stranger than it sounds, and a whole lot funnier and vastly more surreal, and somehow more touching.

Long before Law & Order, L.A. Law or even Matlock, there was Perry Mason, the great-granddaddy of all TV lawyers. Now you can watch every episode of this class television series, which ran from 1957 and 1966 and starred Raymond Burr in the title role as the impossibly brilliant, impeccably dressed defense attorney who won almost everyone one of the 271 cases in this handsome boxed-set collection (Paramount Home Video).

AT THE MOVIES

Emily Blunt is a standout in the much-anticipated movie adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ best-selling psychological thriller The Girl on the Train, about Rachel, an alcoholic woman reeling from the dissolution of her marriage who obsessively watches another woman each day from the window of a train—until she disappears and Rachel becomes a prime suspect in her murder.

In the comedy Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life, a quiet teen (Griffin Gluck), tired of all the structure and desperate to shake things up, comes up with a plan: Break every single rule and let the student run wild. Also starring Rob Riggle and Lauren Graham.

Set in the antebellum South, The Birth of a Nation follow Nat Turner (Nate Parker), a literate slave and preacher, whose financially strained owner (Arnie Hammer) accepts an offer to use Nat’s preaching to subdue unruly slaves. But as he witnesses countless atrocities—against himself and fellow slaves—Turner orchestrates an uprising in hopes of leading his people to freedom.

Those clicks on social media can come back to haunt you! In the very scary Friend Request, a college student (Alycia Debnam Carey from TV’s Fear the Walking Dead) un-friends a mysterious girl online and quickly finds herself fighting a demonic presence trying to kill off all her “real” friends.