FREE TO AIR
The Good Wife, Ten, 9.30pm
After the traumas of last season (oh, you know, your unrequited love is shot and killed in a courtroom), Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) is back on firmer ground. Her law firm is going so well that Diane (Christine Baranski) wants to join the fun, and Eli (Alan Cumming) is hatching a plan that will have her run for Illinois state attorney. The only problem is that her partner, Cary, has just been arrested for conspiring to sell $1.3 million worth of heroin. Oh, that. It's easy to guess what happens - Alicia rallies the troops and a hair is never, ever out of place. And that's my one quibble with The Good Wife - it's too slick. The lipstick never budges, everyone's hair is perfect, and a wrinkle of worry never passes Alicia's brow. Maybe I don't spend enough time around highfalutin legal folk, but a little bit of dropped lunch every now and then wouldn't hurt.
Salamander, SBS One, 9.30pm
Sick of the Scandis hogging the market in police dramas with the The Killing and The Bridge, the Belgians have stepped into the ring with Salamander. However, whereas the Scandis prefer the grey light of winter, Salamander opens with a gang tunnelling into a private Brussels bank at 7.30am on a sunny Sunday. They target 66 safes belonging to top names in politics, business, courts, royalty, unions and the military. The owner of the bank refuses to contact the police, so it takes a tip-off to bring Tin Tin - sorry, wrong Belgian detective - Paul Gerardi onto the case. Like Belgium itself, Salamander is not as slick or as good-looking as the Scandis (the cast have the doughy features of professional waffle eaters), but it's reasonably tense.
Timothy, ABC, 9.30pm
Timothy (Stephen Curry) lives at home with his parents in Wollongong. A former high-flying executive, he suffered a mental breakdown after his tech investment firm collapsed during the GFC. He's making his parents' life a misery as his therapist keeps telling them not to push his recovery, even though he appears perfectly fine. A one-off comedy that was commissioned for the ABC's week of mental health programming, Timothy's main problem is that, mental health issues or not, Timothy himself is a jerk. As his parents, Denise Scott and Peter Rowsthorn bring a lot of goodwill, but they both deserve better than this.
Louise Rugendyke
PAY TV
True Tori, Arena, 8.30pm
Tori Spelling is back in yet another vanity reality series. This one chronicles her ordeal after her husband, Dean McDermott, confessed to cheating on her and went into treatment for his alcoholism and depression, leaving her to look after their four kids on her own.
Whether Spelling did this show for the money, for the attention, or for the imagined benefit of women in similar situations is difficult to say.
But it did cause something of a stir in the US this year when, in a later episode, Spelling unhappily revealed that McDermott had cajoled her into performing sex acts with which she was uncomfortable.
If you're uncomfortable with that level of revelation, spare a thought for Spelling's kids, who are constantly in front of the camera as she ferries them around town, pausing only to berate the paparazzi for taking photos of them.
But, unless Spelling and McDermott are better actors than they've hitherto given us reason to believe, the emotion here is very real.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
No Country for Old Men (2007), One, 9.30pm
At the end of Joel and Ethan Coen's masterful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel about the bloody debris of the drug trade crossing the West Texan borderlands in 1980, Tommy Lee Jones' ageing sheriff recounts a dream about watching his late father ride past through the mountains at night. The deceased lawman is carrying fire, to make light and nurture warmth, and that idea of humanity's fragile march forward through the vast blackness underpins the gunfights and savagery that follows the decision by a hunter, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), to pocket a case full of cartel cash and attempt to escape those charged with recovering it. Eerily tense sequences of pursuit and traps sprung dominate the story, but it plays out as a kind of spiritual inquisition, with Javier Bardem's coolly unhinged assassin, Anton Chigurh, as the representative of the very oldest of underworlds sent to test both the faith and courage of those whose murderous path he crosses.
Blow Out (1981), Fox Classics (pay TV), 8.35pm
Borrowing the idea of an artisan whose talents unexpectedly reveal a murder conspiracy from Antonioni's Blowup, Brian De Palma's thriller finds the director at his most cynical, with his elegant camera work relentlessly picking over his character's failings. The director's misanthropic disillusionment with people is a given, but Blow Out also suggests that whatever an individual finds to fill that void - be it technical expertise or patriotic fervour - will also be revealed as a sham or corrupt. In the case of John Travolta's Jack Terry it's the purity of sound - a film technician who keeps a boom mic between himself and the world. Jack accidentally records evidence that a politician was assassinated. Caught in a conspiracy resembling a nightmarish conflation of Watergate and Chappaquiddick, he is virtually fated to repeat past failings as he's inexorably pursued by John Lithgow's murderous Burke, an operative whose calm disregard for human life comes to reflect De Palma's own isolation.
Craig Mathieson
