screens

Bearing Witness
May 26 at 9 on A&E

This film about contemporary female war correspondents by veteran documentarians Barbara Kopple, Bob Eisenhardt, and Marijana Wotton avoids grand pronouncements about gender and reporting. Instead it offers an intimate, sidelong glance at the Iraq war and an understated portrait of five remarkable women, including London Times writer Marie Colvin, with her husky chain-smoker's voice and eye patch, who imagines she's writing "a rough draft of history," or Janine DiGiovanni, torn between new baby and war zone work. Then there's May Ying Welsh, a young American who took a post at Al Jazeera hoping to bridge the cultural divide; her exhausted face tells you how thoroughly this hope has been extinguished.

Bad Girl's Guide
Tuesdays at 9:30 on UPN

Jenny McCarthy reprises her old rude-girl persona in this sitcom about an advertising exec who likes to party. The cutesy quotient is high—everyone talks like they're auditioning for a Reese Witherspoon role—with writers allowing McCarthy to utter lines like "I don't know what it is about this guy, but the moment I met him, I knew I would Google him!"