Giving Up the ‘Ghost’ and More CBS Comedy, Peacock’s Gripping ‘Vigil,’ NCAA Record-Breaker, ‘Vince Staples Show’

Season Premiere

8:30/7:30c

What does it mean to move on when you’ve already been dead for years, and what’s the impact on those left behind? Those existential dilemmas run through the Season 3 opener of the terrific supernatural comedy, which resolves the cliffhanger in which Sam (Rose McIver) witnessed a shaft of light “sucking off” one of the estate’s many colorful spirits to the great eternal beyond. In the initial confusion of who’s missing, one of the ghosts has the misfortune of suggesting that it was maybe “just a basement ghost.” Those turn out to be fighting words. Mostly, though, the episode is a touching exploration of letting someone go, even if that someone has been gone for many moons.

Season Premiere

8/7c

CBS’s strongest comedy night kicks off with the beginning of the Big Bang Theory prequel’s seventh and final season, finding the Cooper family making do in the wake of a tornado disaster. Meemaw’s (Annie Potts) house is in ruins, turning the Cooper home into a crowded mess and forcing Missy (Raegan Revord) to step up as the adult of the house. Housemother Mary (Zoe Perry) is distraught to be an ocean away in Germany with Sheldon (Iain Armitage), but when she frantically tries to make arrangements for them to return home, the boy genius retorts: “The people of Germany are obsessed with rules and devoid of humor. I am home.”

Season Premiere

9/8c

A perfect fit on a light Thursday lineup, the comedy-mystery opens its second season with Todd Wright (the charming Skylar Astin) unusually chipper, having regained his P.I. license and hanging his shingle in his mother Margaret’s (Marcia Gay Harden) law office. She’s almost got too much on her plate to notice: Her MIA ex-husband (Mark Moses) has returned from “finding himself” in Iceland, complicating her relationship with fellow lawyer Gus (a likably rumpled Jeffrey Nordling), and her promotion to managing partner comes with unpleasant strings. But first, there’s a case of the week, involving a bizarre murder on a live local morning TV news show where the main suspect is the co-anchor (Real Housewife Lisa Rinna).

Season Premiere

Recommended to fans of thrillers like Homeland, this taut British mystery series returns for a second six-episode season, again involving murder in a military setting. (If you missed the first season, set aboard a nuclear sub, binge that first.) Suranne Jones (Gentleman Jack) returns as fearlessly focused Scottish Detective Chief Inspector Amy Silva, investigating a training exercise involving weaponized drones that turned deadly on an Air Force base. The trail takes her to a fictional Middle East country that’s funding the expensive project, an unfriendly environment for a female cop. Her partner on the job and in life, DI Kirsten Longacre (Game of Thrones’ Rose Leslie), is expecting their child, and Silva is torn between pursuing the truth in a complex web of espionage and worrying that Kirsten will put herself in harm’s way back home.

Sports history could be made when the No. 4 Iowa Hawkeyes host Michigan (starting at 8/7c), with breakout Iowa star Caitlin Clark poised to break the NCAA women’s all-time scoring record. She has 3,520 career points after Sunday’s game, when she scored 31 points. She is eight points away from breaking Kelsey Plum’s scoring record of 3,527. Peacock will present an alternate feed, “Caitlin Cast Presented by State Farm,” during the game, following Clark’s every move on the court as she makes her historic run.

Series Premiere

Hip-hop star and sometimes actor Vince Staples (Janine’s former beau Maurice on Abbott Elementary) plays an exaggerated version of himself in a satirical and self-referential comedy that he created and is executive produced by black-ish creator Kenya Barris. The five-episode series, which includes cameos by the likes of Rick Ross, follows Vince on his daily routine, which rarely goes according to plan.

INSIDE THURSDAY TV:

• Next Level Chef (8/7c, Fox): The 15 top chefs are drafted into three teams, guided by Gordon Ramsay, Nyesha Arrington and Richard Blais. Their first challenge: create an all-American smash burger.
• Genius: MLK/X (9/8c, National Geographic): A standout episode of the dual biography docudrama focuses on the wives of the civil-rights leaders, Coretta Scott King (Weruche Opia) and Betty Shabazz (Jayme Lawson). In the second episode, Martin Luther King Jr. (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and Malcolm X (Aaron Pierre) have different views on the historic March on Washington, but both are rocked by President Kennedy’s assassination.
• Son of a Critch (9/8c, The CW): In a rite of coming-of-age passage, Mark (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) sells his comic-book collection and immediately wishes he hadn’t.
• Bold and Bougie (9/8c, WE tv): Loud and proud, five women who’ve lived full lives—Malaysia Pargo, Tameka Foster, Gocha Hawkins, Princess Banton-Lofters and Crystal Smith—take Atlanta by storm in a new reality series.
• Truth and Lies: The Doomsday Prophet (9/8c, ABC): The docuseries goes inside the controversial cult of the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints and its disgraced and jailed founder, Warren Letts.

 ON THE STREAM:

• Halo (streaming on Paramount+): There will be consequences in the sci-fi action series when Master Chief John-1127 (Pablo Schreiber) leads his team on a rogue mission, casting more doubts on his claims of an impending attack on their home colony, Reach.
• Far North (streaming on Sundance Now): A comedic six-part thriller from New Zealand tells how a Māori mechanic and his aqua-aerobics instructor wife helped foil a drug-dealing gang’s plans to cash in on a half-billion worth of meth.
• The Truth About Jim (streaming on Max): A four-part true-crime docuseries from Investigation Discovery follows amateur sleuth Sierra Barter as she probes troubling family secrets to discover if her abusive step-grandfather Jim Mordecai was a serial killer.
• Churchy (streaming on BET+): Comedian Kevin “KevOnStage” Fredericks stars in a comedy series as Corey Carr Jr., who leaves his father’s megachurch when passed over for promotion and starts over in smaller-town Lubbock, Texas.