Over the past 1.5 years as I've tried and failed to install mythtv -- does that make me a permanent newbie? -- mythbackend has changed its parameters. It used to take stop, restart. and force-reload. Now it doesn't. Now -h says it takes --printexpire, --printsched, etc. Did mythbackend change? Do I have a corrupt version? Or am I missing something so obvious that I'm going to be deeply embarrassed when I find out?

I don't know about previous versions, but on my KM R5D1 systems mythbackend uses the --printexpire, etc. options you refer to.

/etc/init.d/mythtv-backend, on the otherhand, accepts stop/start/restart|force-reload.

D'oh!