Entertainment

Netflix returns to one of the more familiar tales of the past half-century. Adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” the eight-part limited series “Ripley” evokes the early 1960s with lush black-and-white photography and period sets and details.

Kids and teens

Money changes everything. And can ruin a lot as well — lives, whole industries and art forms among them. “Loot” returns for a second season on Apple TV+, a streaming service underwritten by a tech company that made news some years back when it became the first business valued at more than a trillion dollars. It was less of a big deal when it reached the $2 trillion mark, and it’s now well on its way to three.

Using reenactments and interviews with historians, “Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator” (9 p.m., PBS) will air over the next three Tuesday nights.

Netflix celebrates April Fools’ Day with “The Magic Prank Show.” Magician and comedian Justin Willman uses his skills and his team of professional illusionists to help ordinary people blow the minds of their friends, and more frequently, their frenemies.

Brooding, quiet, intense and capable of anything — these are the traits associated with characters played by Giancarlo Esposito, especially since his turn as Gus Fring in “Breaking Bad.”

“American Masters” (9 p.m., PBS) will dedicate the next two Friday nights to an all but vanished breed: the public intellectual, profiling Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (tonight) and William F. Buckley (April 5).

Joey King stars in the Hulu limited series adaptation of “We Were the Lucky Ones.” A tale of a Polish family scattered by the Holocaust and the attempts of surviving members to find their relatives after the war, it is based on novelist Georgia Hunter’s own family history.

Kids and teens

Republic reporter Brian Blair offers his take on area events.