Unlike the other Oscar-nominated short subjects, these filmlets are long enough—at least a half-hour each—to require two separate showings. The first has three offerings, all touching on issues of marginalization.

To Mindy Alper, “Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405”. That’s because a major slowdown can give her a chance to draw people in their cars. Alper has a host of social and learning disabilities. Her cramped apartment is a virtual pharmacy of daily meds, and she speaks in odd locutions, saying her possibly abusive father “would louder his sound” when talking to her, and recalling something that happened “when I am one-nine” years old. But these barriers haven’t stopped her from making dramatic art, most stunningly in papier-mâché. (She prefers the Wall Street Journal to the flimsy L.A. Times.) Some childhood drawings are animated for the film, and that gets a little busy, while minor-key thuds resound on the soundtrack when bad events are introduced, and the camera works too hard to act out her phobias. But the film gets under Alper’s skin, and the viewer’s.

The newlyweds profiled in “Edith + Eddie” got married at the ages of 95 and 96, after they split a winning lottery ticket. Some subsequent drama is built around the absurd term interracial—he’s white, she isn’t—but most of the standard problems come from Edith’s family, who seem more worried about her property than her happiness. It’s a touching, if somewhat TV-like, production.

Race figures more heavily in “Traffic Stop”, not made available in time for review. This HBO production, from veteran PBS director Kate Davis, tackles the timely issue of frequently fatal encounters between black motorists and white police officers. But it does this by focusing on one woman who survived her ordeal.

In “Heroin(e)”, the first of two 40-minuters in the second program, we follow three women in Huntington, West Virginia: a judge, a pastor, and a medical examiner—and eventually a county fire chief dealing with the opioid crisis. Last year, their small town saw 28 overdoses in a single day. “I can’t even fathom what it will look like when this plateaus,” the ME states, “but we know it will be broken.”

It’s heartening to see addicts, firefighters, doctors, and legal advocates all pulling in roughly the same direction. But there’s a nagging sense that official compassion is more easily attached to the process when the word white precedes “working class”.

One of the most rarely looked-at aspects of mass incarceration of the mostly minority side of the American equation is the vast amount of talent that’s wasted when millions of people are locked up. Ex-cons get to show off their “Knife Skills”, a straightforward, fly-on-the-kitchen-wall affair from director Thomas Lennon, another PBS veteran and not the comic actor. If there were more fine restaurants like Edwin’s, in Cleveland, giving society’s outcasts a real shot at redemption, we wouldn’t need so many documentaries.