FREE TO AIR
From Dusk till Dawn, SBS2, 8.30pm
It was inevitable that Robert Rodriguez's TV incarnation of his film was going to take things at a slower pace, having to stretch the story out over 10 episodes (and apparently there's a second season to come!), but one wonders if even viewers who are new to the storyline are finding things a little slow. Especially given this episode takes place almost entirely inside the RV of the family they've kidnapped to help get them across the border, the Fullers; preacher Jacob (Robert Patrick), his daughter Kate (Madison Davenport) and son Scott (Brandan Soo Hoo). Through some flashbacks we learn about Jacob's loss of faith, and we learn that Richie, naturally, believes Jacob is a demon. It's a slow old episode but, eventually, the RV reaches the border and the Titty Twister bar, where, as fans of the cult film will know, we can finally expect some hardcore vampire action. Bring it on.
Under the Dome, Ten, 8.30pm
''I think the Dome's trying to tell us something'' - said pretty much everyone in every episode throughout season one. Most of us were hoping it was trying to tell them to push the narrative arc along a little. Seems it's done so marginally in this new season, but only in as much as a few characters have been killed off and replaced. Even with the weekly addition of new trauma for Chester's Mill - the magnetic pulses, the plagues, the weird red acid rain, the revelation about Big Jim's wife - we're still no closer to any kind of explanation. If you've hung in there, despite some awful acting, try not to think about the fact that Under the Dome's executive producer, Jack Bender, also worked on Lost for several years. We all know how that ended/didn't end. Perhaps this new is-it-isn't-it time travelling/wormhole angle will nudge things along. Perhaps.
Jennifer Byrne Presents: The Seven Deadly Sins - Pride, ABC, 10pm
A lively episode tonight as Jennifer Byrne delves into each of the seven sins over seven weeks. Tonight it's pride, which sounds at first like a bit of a dull sin, really, but is apparently ''the gravest of the seven deadly sins''. Thanks to a diverse panel of guests - former Vogue editor Kirstie Clements, Wheeler Centre director Michael Williams, broadcaster and writer Ramona Koval and former TV host/lawyer Steve Vizard - it's a lively discussion.
KYLIE NORTHOVER
PAY TV
The Jo Whiley Show, Bio, 8.30pm
There is none of the provocative Jo Whiley who baited Lily Allen in the 2007 couch interview that became a YouTube hit, but plenty of what Caitlin Moran cruelly described in her Times column as an ‘‘on-screen style that ... makes her look as if she’s about to corkscrew right off her chair and start drilling into the ground’’. The BBC Radio music host is all giggles talking with Nicky Wire of Manic Street Preachers, Pop Idol winner Will Young and rapper Professor Green about the effect on the industry of reality talent shows. Beneath Whiley’s awkwardness is a curiosity that provokes insight.
Wentworth, SoHo, 8.30pm
As a remake of a classic Australian drama, Wentworth is a standout success. Each episode contains excellent performances by Danielle Cormack in the lead role of Bea Smith, Nicole da Silva as merciless top dog Franky Doyle, and Katrina Milosevic as standover bitch Boomer Jenkins. Pamela Rabe is magnificently chilling in her reinvention of perhaps the most iconic role of the 1979 original, Prisoner, making the governor, Joan ‘‘The Freak’’ Ferguson, her own ruthlessly manipulative beast. Tonight, the simmering tension explodes, with inmates and wardens at breaking point. Bea prepares for a showdown with Franky, the results of which are terrifyingly thrilling.
BRIDGET MCMANUS
MOVIES
The Black Dahlia (2006), Masterpiece Movies (pay TV), 6.25pm
Director Brian De Palma is fascinated by moments of terror, instances when what’s occurring acquires a kind of hysteria for both the character and the audience. Novelist James Ellroy is fascinated by the detritus of vast conspiracies, the motivations behind bloody crimes that open out to reveal layers of misdeed and calculation. In short, the former was ill-suited to direct an adaptation of the latter’s breakthrough 1987 novel. In the booming, corrupt LA of 1947, police detectives Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) are a law unto their own department. Former boxing rivals now partners, united away from their office by their bond with Blanchard’s de facto partner, Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson, in a succession of tight sweaters). Their cozy domesticity falls asunder when the body of Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirshner), a young hopeful existing on the periphery of Hollywood, is found violently murdered in a vacant lot, unleashing obsession and melodramatic revelation.
The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), ABC, 1.55am (Wednesday)
Shirley Temple was aged 18 and soon to retire when this deft comedy was released in 1946 while Cary Grant, as the artist who her high school student becomes infatuated with, was 42. The attraction of Temple’s Susan to Grant’s Richard is played out with chaste humour, with the prevailing belief that the younger woman is going through a phase and that the best solution, agreed to her by her older sister and guardian, Margaret (Myrna Loy), is for Richard to date Susan until she tires of the older man. The comic kick in a film cleanly directed by the barely remembered Irving Reis (The Big Street) comes from putting the urbane Grant into a high school setting, complete with jealous boyfriend and novelty races at a picnic; Grant knew how to make indignities self-deprecatingly funny, while the film switches the gender roles of the time, with women fighting over him before he realises it’s Margaret he’s meant for.
CRAIG MATHIESON
