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Worst Place to be a Pilot, SBS One, 8.30pm
As if being a pilot isn’t risky enough, this series highlights the more remote destinations that pilots fly to that bring even more dangers. With jobs for pilots scarce in Britain, these aviators boost their flying hours in the islands of Indonesia, in the hope that, though dangerous, it may help them get their dream job back home. Unpredictable weather, unsophisticated navigational equipment and unfamiliar terrain, including an active volcano, make for a rather more exciting trip than the Luton to Dublin route. Despite its hazards, the work also brings unexpected joys, including an invitation to join tribespeople in their homes.
Law & Order SVU, Ten, 9pm
Now in its 16th year, the spin-off to Dick Wolf’s original Law & Order series is still going strong. With storylines often based on real crimes and its realistic treatment of how sex crimes are investigated and tried, the show has proved a huge success. It is now the longest running, scripted non-animation prime-time series in the US. I love the Hill Street Blues feel and the title music before the show begins with the fateful words, “These are their stories”. In this first episode of the new series we follow Sergeant Benson, who is on the hunt for the killer of her foster son’s mother, Ellie, a hooker found gang-raped and burnt. When an underage sex worker is pulled over by the cops, she is revealed to be a witness to Ellie’s murder, putting her own life in danger.
Kate Duthie
Gallipoli, Nine, 9pm
This ambitious eight-hour miniseries approaches its account of Australia’s involvement in World War I with a firm focus on one critical and contentious campaign. Written by Christopher Lee and directed by Glendyn Ivin, the immersive drama keeps the bitter battle for the Turkish hills at its core as it introduces its tale of two brothers, Tolly (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and Bevan (Harry Greenwood) Johnson. The double-episode opener, set on the day that the Allied troops land on the beach, provides a potent sense of what’s to come: an insight into the bloody brutality of war and the toll it takes on those involved. It soon becomes a sorry saga of inadequate planning, chaotic communications and the lamentable chasm between the officers and the soldiers on the frontlines as the death toll rises.
Debi Enker
PAY TV
The Walking Dead, FX, 8.30pm
The Walking Dead is such a cruel show. Sure, no zombie apocalypse is ever going to be all sunshine and lollipops – but for Beth to have been ripped away from Maggie and the others just when they were going to get her back is almost too much. Even the walkers themselves have more heart than that, to judge by the impressive sprays of blood as Michonne (Danai Gurira) grimly resumes decapitating them tonight. The series is in an elegiac mood after its mid-season hiatus. Everybody’s mourning Beth, but it’s more than that – there’s the feeling that we’re watching a requiem-in-advance for somebody else. In any case, Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and the gang have decided to help Noah (Tyler James Williams) get to Virginia, where he hopes he still has family in a fortified village. It’s what Beth would have wanted. Strangely, this episode (written by showrunner Scott M. Gimple) feels like a bit of a potboiler. Even the big development seems like an anticlimax and the blast from the past a little hokey. That said, next week can’t get here soon enough.
Dog with a Blog, Disney, 6pm
The adorable talking dog does indeed write a blog, but it’s his human family that gets most of the screen time in this decent live-action comedy. It’s no side-splitter but it’s better than some adult sitcoms.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
The Hurt Locker (2008), Go, 9.30pm
In Kathryn Bigelow’s compelling drama, a US Army bomb disposal expert serving in occupied Iraq, Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner, in a career-making performance), approaches his job with the glee of an addict afforded a fix; he takes risks which leave his support team, Anthony Mackie’s Sanborn and Brian Geraghty’s Eldridge, aghast. Bigelow, directing from a screenplay by previously embedded journalist Mark Boal, captures the vital intensity of James, but she depicts his milieu with a masterful regard for geography and space. The anti-Paul Greengrass, she fixes James and the nightmarish home ordinance he virtually attacks amid streets, cars, and eventually co-opted bodies. The tension is constant but ever-changing, and a long sequence where the team encounter a group of British mercenaries who are under sniper attack, turns distance into a dreadful pause as rounds arrive just after the sound of them being fired.
Role Models (2008), Comedy Movies (pay TV), 6.45pm
Role Models blithely promotes ever more ludicrous situations that it can’t quite sustain; this is a comedy of endless punches but not enough lines. There’s never more than 90 seconds between the provocation and the pay-off (as amusing as some of them are), and poor Elizabeth Banks, a fine comic actress, is shunted aside to merely play the exasperated girlfriend. But the picture does have a commitment to a blase, deadpan attitude, alternately vicious and nonplussed, that is summed up in the efforts to make do undertaken by Danny (Paul Rudd) and Wheeler (Seann William Scott), a pair of energy drink salesmen who self-destruct on a school visit and end up sentenced to community service on a ‘‘Big Brother’’ style scheme mentoring troubled youth. Dodging matters of class and poverty, they respectively draw a role-playing game nerd and a foul-mouthed primary school student. Naturally the adults can only help the children once they’ve cured themselves. Even in charity they’re selfish.
Craig Mathieson