If there’s anything amiss with the first “History Detectives” episode of the season, which airs on many PBS stations but is pre-empted for pledge period programming on KQED, it may be that it opens with the biggest of its three cases: whether a 1964 Stratocaster electric guitar with a sunburst design is the instrument used by Bob Dylan when he took to the stage of Newport Folk Festival in July 1965 and, instead of performing his acoustic signature songs, plugged in and changed the course of American pop music forever.

The instrument is owned by a woman named Dawn Peterson, whose late father was said to have been a pilot for several acts in the ’60s, including Peter, Paul and Mary, the Band and Dylan himself.

To determine whether the guitar was Dylan’s, “History” hosts Elyse Luray and Wes Cowan talk to a Dylan expert at Rolling Stone, a former road manager for the band, and a guitar expert in Rochester, N.Y., who carefully compares blown-up photographs of Dylan performing at Newport with the actual guitar, going so far as to see if the wood grain in the body and neck of the guitar matches.

The season premiere sticks with rock music history with two other investigations, one involving a photograph and a room service menu from Miami’s Deauville Hotel, where the Beatles performed in 1964.

Movie review Brattier Peter Parker brings it on with amazing special effects, 3-D [...] the bottom line, then we’ll fill in the details: “The Amazing Spider-Man” is a good Spider-Man movie. The new movie benefits from recent strides in computer graphics, so that now, finally, when Spider-Man swings from building to building, he no longer looks like a little stick figure bobbing up and down on a computer screen. The effects are convincing in both long and medium shot, such that you stop thinking of them as effects and start reacting to them, getting weak-kneed as Spider-Man teeters from the edge of skyscrapers. Part of the fun of any first Spider-Man installment is in waiting for Peter to recognize his newfound Spider-Man abilities, and yet the revelation scene in “The Amazing Spider-Man” is a disappointment. In this scene and others, first-time feature director Marc Webb has too much of a tendency to film action scenes with a series of tight close-ups. Suffice it to say, there are nuances to the villainy here, worthy of a good comic book, and not a bad cartoon, even if the stakes are as extreme as the possible destruction of New York City and the genetic corruption of the human species. Denis Leary, who has made a good career out of grumpiness, plays Gwen’s dad, the New York City police chief, and he’s exactly the right kind of unsmiling guy that no teenage boy would want as his girlfriend’s father.