As a Scientist with a life-long fascination with space and the stars I always look forward to NOVA, especially when the topic is other worlds. This program covers what we think we know about requirements for life and some of the techniques used in recent decades to search the rest of the universe for signs of intelligent life. Like Keppler which Astronomers think has uncovered thousands of planets around distant stars. The reason I say "think" is because all the methods are indirect, we have not actually observed, optically, one of those planets.
There is one glaring omission in programs like this. They mention some stars are 50 light years away, some 124 light years away, some much farther. So even if (a big "IF") we could figure out how to get a space craft up to one-tenth the speed of light, it would take 500 or 1,000 or 10,000 years to travel to one, even just to send a probe. The reality is likely a somewhat slower maximum speed, requiring even greater thousands of years.
So the search for life in alien worlds is strictly academic, strictly for curiosity, because from all that we know today about space travel we could never get to one of them. Or if we ever did life on Earth would likely have ended by the time the craft arrived there.
To me that discussion needs to be clearly included in these sorts of programs, it is a critical part of the discussion.