FREE TO AIR
The Sixties, SBS One, 7.30pm
There are two popular takes on the '60s. The first is that anyone who says they remember them wasn't there. The second is that the '60s didn't happen everywhere. Both takes rely on the view that the decade was dominated by a drug-fuelled counter-culture that challenged traditional social norms around authority, sex and personal relations. Truth is, while the decade was one of profound change inspired by youthful idealism and new social freedom, life in Middle America was much less revolutionary.
As the technology of television staked its place at the centre of the American home, the country was increasingly able to see itself in richer, more comprehensive and more complex ways.
News and entertainment were transformed by the box, creating new rules for political communication and a mass audience for advertisers. Assassinations and wars could be beamed into homes in all their horror, fuelling emotional repercussions. On the other hand, folksy depictions of innocent American life could be reassuring and bond a nation.
In a decade when America was tearing itself apart, television was doing its best to bring it together. Looking back from a time when the internet and social media are splintering audiences in countless ways, television in the '60s looks snug and comforting, a force for social good. Naive? Probably.
Please Like Me, ABC2, 9pm
The contradiction in the title of Josh Thomas' comedy is that he is likeable; there's no need to beg for approval. That self-deprecation tinged with insecurity is what makes him likeable, of course. The Thomas we see here is more confident than in other TV forays - think Talkin' Bout Your Generation - prompting the question: Which is the real Josh Thomas? No matter, his fictional family comedy is smart and deserves a much bigger audience. Tonight, a date with boyfriend Arnold goes wrong thanks to a possum.
Nurse Jackie, Eleven, 10.50pm
After six seasons, Jackie (Edie Falco) is still holding it together as she battles drug and booze. Unless she hits rock-bottom the argument could be made that Nurse Jackie supports drug use. Mainstream television doesn't work like that; we must trust the fall will come. It doesn't come in this episode, but boyfriend Frank (Adam Ferrera) is about to crank up the pressure.
Gordon Farrer
PAY TV
The Crimson Field, BBC First, 8.30pm
It's the terrific cast and the unnerving calm that stand out in this drama about a World War I field hospital. Three hurriedly trained volunteer nurses - the rebellious Kitty (Oona Chaplin), the ditzy Flora (Alice St Clair) and the uptight Rosalie (Marianne Oldham) - arrive in France to find the hospital not quite the abattoir we might have imagined. There are horrors here and there, but the newcomers' greatest source of stress is their unwelcoming professional superiors (Hermione Norris and Kerry Fox). Somewhere between the two groups is the highly trained Joan (Suranne Jones). There are men there, too, nice chaps and rotters from every social stratum, but it's the women who command attention.
What Remains, 13th Street, 8.30pm
A dark and absorbing start to a four-part mystery that some British critics mention in the same breath as Broadchurch and Top of the Lake. A young couple (Russell Tovey and Amber Rose Revah) move into a tenement house and find a woman's body in the attic. Retiring copper Len Harper (David Threlfall) thinks it's suspicious, but his colleagues want to let it drop. Hungover from his send-off, he begins his own probe into the woman's neighbours, who include a severe sort played by Indira Varma and a creepy teacher played by David Bamber.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
20 Feet From Stardom (2013), Masterpiece Movies (pay TV), 8.30pm
"The walk to the front is complicated," notes Bruce Springsteen, one of several famous musicians who contribute to this compelling documentary about the strange parallel careers of backing vocalists. Focusing mainly on some of the prodigious African-American voices that emerged in the 1960s, Morgan Neville's film follows the fortunes of, among others, Merry Clayton, who turned up at short notice for the session for the Rolling Stones Gimme Shelter in pyjamas and a fur coat and delivered a coup de grace to the decade, and Darlene Love, who had to escape contractual imprisonment with Phil Spector. These are the voices that anonymously fuelled hit songs, and some struggled with that while others came to embrace being out of the celebrity spotlight. A modern equivalent, Judith Hill, ended up on the reality singing show The Voice, and if the outcomes have changed, the peculiar circumstances of talent, opportunity and luck crossing paths remains very much the same.
The Lusty Men (1952), TCM (pay TV), 3.45pm
Nicholas Ray's incredible run of films in the 1950s began with In a Lonely Place and took in Rebel Without a Cause, Bitter Victory, Johnny Guitar, Bigger Than Life and this haunting elegy to the loss that goes hand in hand with fierce ambition. In a hardscrabble life of cowhands and rodeo tramps, the director's 1952 classic turns on a melancholic romantic triangle between a battered former rodeo champion (Robert Mitchum), the ambitious young cowboy he mentors (Arthur Kennedy), and the proud, wary wife who longs to leave the brutal circuit (Susan Hayward). Shot in part on location by veteran Hollywood cinematographer Lee Garmes, personal hopes are revealed to be as fleeting as the excitement of the rodeo, which leaves behind empty, windswept grounds and those who can no longer keep up. Ray captured a bittersweet dynamic between the leads, turning on Hayward's quietly fierce determination and the imposing frame of Mitchum, whose laconic watchfulness was never more melancholy than it is here.
Craig Mathieson
