College Football Championship, NBA Tripleheader, Justice With Judy, Spend ‘120 Hours Behind Bars’

College Football Playoff National Championship

If anyone sees me wearing red today (from pullover to socks), it’s because I’m showing my true colors as a Hoosier and rooting for the No. 1 undefeated team and its Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback, Fernando Mendoza, to keep their perfect record intact. They’ll be taking on No. 10 Miami in that team’s home field of Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, where Mendoza grew up.

NBA Tripleheader (starts at 2:30 pm/ET, NBC): More sports action with the NBA’s traditional Martin Luther King Jr. Day extravaganza, a triple-header that opens with reigning champ Oklahoma City Thunder facing the Cavaliers in Cleveland’s Rocket Arena. Followed at 5 pm/ET by the Dallas Mavericks and No. 1 draft pick Cooper Flagg visiting Madison Square Garden to play against the New York Knicks. In prime time (8 pm/ET), the Boston Celtics battle the Detroit Pistons at Motor City’s Little Caesars Arena.

Judy Justice

“This is not a soap opera!” crows TV’s most famous judge, Judy Sheindlin, whose plain talk behind the bench has made her a fan favorite for 30 years since the original Judge Judy launched in 1996. She opens her fourth season on streaming with three episodes, with new episodes dropping every weekday through April 10. She hasn’t lost a step, or a quip, in her early 80s, heard muttering, “I’m getting older by the second” when the court proceedings test her patience.

120 Hours Behind Bars

A new docuseries sends camera crews inside some of the nation’s toughest prisons, revealing overcrowded conditions and an undercurrent of violence. The opener spends five days inside Louisiana’s Washington Parish Jail, where the new sheriff and his deputies try to maintain order with a population over capacity.

Also from the true-crime blotter: People Magazine Investigates (9/8c, Investigation Discovery) revisits the murders in 2022 of two gay men in New York’s lively Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, revealing a criminal gang that scoped out victims in bars, drugging them and then draining their bank accounts.

Hidden Assets

The Irish crime drama’s third season goes abroad again as the series takes a one-year time jump, sending DS Claire Wallace (Nora-Jane Noone) into Spain’s Basque Country after an investigative reporter and her family are brutally killed in Bilbao. The deaths are linked to a Criminal Assets Bureau raid that ended in tragedy, revealing a web of corruption.

Also on Acorn TV: A new episode of the much lighter New Zealand mystery My Life Is Murder, in which Alexa (Lucy Lawless) finds herself embroiled in a pet custody feud after a wealthy dog owner takes a fatal fall. On the home front, Alexa isn’t thrilled to learn her brother is mixed up in a shady scheme.