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Forget Fireworks: A Couch Potato’s TV Lineup 

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“Vera,” with Brenda Blethyn as the detective Vera Stanhope and Kenny Doughty as her colleague in this series on Acorn TV. Acorn TV 
Forget fireworks; the real purpose of holiday-week down time is to catch up on overlooked small-screen offerings. Yet that means different things to different people.
Some want pithy acting and substantive inquiry. Others, their brains in vacation mode, want mindless fluff. So here is an assortment of shows available now or in the next few days that you may not have been aware of, in descending order of how many brain cells are required to watch them.
VERA AND HARRY The streaming service Acorn TV specializes in shows full of British accents, so you can expect a certain level of sophistication, and on Monday you’ll get it with “Changing Tides,” the first of four new movie-length installments of the venerable “Vera” detective franchise.
The series, based on the novels by Ann Cleeves, stars Brenda Blethyn as Vera Stanhope, an investigator in the classic slow-but-meticulous mold also employed by American shows like “Columbo” and “Murder, She Wrote.” Vera is fusty and a bit brusque and has “British reserve” down to an art form, only very occasionally revealing glimpses of her somewhat melancholy personal life.
“Harry,” with Oscar Kightley, foreground left, as Harry Anglesea, with Sam Neill in this New Zealand detective series on Acorn TV. Acorn TV 
“Changing Tides” is the initial offering of the fifth installment of the series, and Acorn has the United States premiere of three more on successive Mondays. In the opener, there’s a noisy party, an explosion and a dead woman, and Ms. Blethyn’s portrayal is as subtle and satisfying as ever. But Vera has to adjust to a new investigative sidekick; Joe (played by David Leon) is gone, replaced by a fellow named Aiden (Kenny Doughty).
If this is your cup of tea, “Harry,” a six-part New Zealand series that also recently became available on Acorn, is worth a look as well. Oscar Kightley is the title character, a broody detective with a fair amount of personal baggage, and Sam Neill is the mentor who keeps him focused.
THE SEVENTIES CNN, which last year took a 10-part look at the 1960s, is in the midst of an eight-episode examination of the far less groovy 1970s, the decade that began with the Kent State shootings and ended with the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster and the Iranian hostage crisis. Episodes on Watergate, the end of the Vietnam War and 1970s TV have already been shown, and next Thursday’s disturbing installment, “Crime and Cults of the Seventies,” begins with archival footage that seems as unpleasantly current as last month’s headlines.
“The Big Interview with Dan Rather”: Mr. Rather sits down with Emmylou Harris for AXS TV.AXS TV 
It features Vincent T. Bugliosi, then a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles County, saying this about the man he is about to prosecute: Charles Manson “envisioned that white people would turn against the black man if they thought the black man had committed these seven murders, and ultimately there would be a civil war between blacks and whites.”
New episodes are scheduled on Thursdays through Aug. 6, and the one on July 30 promises to be just as glum. It’s titled “Terrorism at Home and Abroad.” But the series should end on an upbeat note: The last installment is about the decade’s popular music.
THE BIG INTERVIEW WITH DAN RATHER Speaking of the ’70s, a young newsman named Dan Rather solidified his status as a rising star in that decade. Mr. Rather, despite some late-career turbulence, is still around, working for AXS TV, where he has lately been offering a pretty good collection of sit-downs with an eclectic roster of entertainment figures: Jack White, Gene Simmons, Trisha Yearwood.
Outdoor Channel 
On Tuesday, beginning a six-episode summer season, it’s the somewhat reticent Emmylou Harris’s turn. Yes, Mr. Rather gently asks her the question that has been following her since, well, the ’70s: Was she romantically involved with Gram Parsons, the country-rock pioneer who helped her start her career and died of an overdose in 1973? Her answer is a little less guarded than it has been in the past, and the segment is framed with bittersweet footage of a young Ms. Harris and then the current one (she is 68) performing a song she wrote (with Bill Danoff) in response to Mr. Parsons’s death, “Boulder to Birmingham.”
SCROTAL RECALL The awful title notwithstanding, you have to love a show whose opening line, spoken to a young man at a health clinic, is, “You’ve tested positive for chlamydia.” And his response? “That doesn’t sound positive.”
The man is Dylan (Johnny Flynn), and this hilarious British series, which became available on Netflix in the spring, is a sort of demented “How I Met Your Mother.” Dylan uses the diagnosis as a reason to look up old girlfriends, one per episode, with his licentious friend, Luke (Daniel Ings), chiming in dubious advice like this: “You’ve got to give yourself strict rules, man. You only talk to people with breasts, and only if they’re younger than 40 and older than 16.” The “16” gets him a quizzical look from Dylan. “Eighteen, then,” he says. “Whatever.”
“Altered Course Montego Bay,” with friends and golfers Amelia Ek and Jada Patipaksiri in this new Golf Channel challenge show. Golf Channel 
BUCK COMMANDER You may be reluctant to probe too deeply into backwoods TV for fear of running into Phil Robertson, the loose cannon of A&E’s “Duck Dynasty,” expounding on a certain recent Supreme Court decision. No worries with Saturday’s Season 6 premiere of “Buck Commander” on the Outdoor Channel. Only the genial Willie Robertson (Phil’s son and the real star of “Duck Dynasty”) turns up in this ridiculously empty-headed hunting show, along with as eclectic an assortment of buddies as you’ll find anywhere.
They include the country music stars Jason Aldean and Luke Bryan; Adam LaRoche, the Chicago White Sox first baseman/designated hitter; and the former major leaguers Ryan Langerhans and Tombo Martin. They do very little in this show except crack wise, talk trash and, occasionally, take a shot at a deer. Major events in the season premiere include pulling a truck out of the mud and chasing away a wasp. As for the hunting, success proves elusive.
“It didn’t matter what state we were in, what part of the country,” Mr. Martin says of the coming season. “If there was deer in your state, they were safe.”
ALTERED COURSE MONTEGO BAY What? There’s something even more empty-headed than “Buck Commander” on this list? Yes, thanks to the Golf Channel, which on Monday nights has this nutty competition show, which tries to make golf interesting and sometimes succeeds. Eight teams of two started out on June 15 competing on a real golf course but under skewed rules. For instance, they’d start from the third tee but had to aim for the 10th-hole pin.
Oh, and it’s all done under an unforgiving time limit, which leaves the golfers, carrying full bags, sprinting to their next shot, sometimes through woods, over obstacles and so on. There’s something very satisfying about seeing golfers, normally so prim and self-important, gasping for air as they rush to make a putt. Two teams have already been eliminated; the finale is Aug. 3.
A version of this article appears in print on July 3, 2015, on page C8 of the New York edition with the headline: Forget Fireworks: A Couch Potato’s TV Lineup . Order Reprints|  Today's Paper|Subscribe