There's nothing inherently sad about spending Friday night home alone during the festive season, unless you happen to fall asleep in front of Death Comes to Pemberley (ABC, Friday, 8.30pm). It's the latest addition to the emerging genre we might call Jane Austen Takes a Thorough Rogering, this horrible little miniseries is a whodunnit set at Mr Darcy's gaff. The title privately beckons Pride and Prejudice fans, who are no more than Trekkies with parasols in place of Tasers, with its nod to Darcy's famous fictional estate.
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The cast is studded with usual bonnet-ripping suspects, all aloof and pale, and oddly pock-marked – creating the illusion that a bout of the plague may have dogged their early years. Death Comes to Pemberley isn't just the boring love child of Gosford Park, if it had been violated by Midsomer Murders. It's a beastly thing to do to Jane Austen. It's only a matter of time before we endure Christian Bale in his tour de force Darcy: Aspy or Just Plain Arrogant.
By way of an alternative, Showcase is offering a very modern period drama in The Knick (Showcase, Wednesday, 7.30pm). Clive Owen is a talented bigoted loose canon surgeon operating in the Knickerbocker Hospital in New York in 1900. He is like Hawkeye Pierce but with a cocaine addiction instead of a martini, and he just hates black people. Interesting guy.
Director Steven Soderbergh makes the most of access to Dr Stanley Burns photo archive of surgical history. The surgical equipment is at once primitive and progressive. With so much bloodshed, a doctor could be excused for shooting up between the toes on his way to work. The Knick shares some of Peaky Blinders' gritty gruesome qualities. The addition of an unexpected soundtrack from Cliff Martinez (Soderbergh's sound collaborator since Sex Lies and Videotape), elevates The Knick above the predictable, or the Pemberley.
Most of the comedy left to us in the long hot unrated months will have a decidedly Pemberley quality, as well. With the finale of Black Comedy (ABC, Wednesday, 9.30pm) you can expect most of your free-to-air laughs to come from the commercials about finding anything wonderful at Myer. This irreverent indigenous comedy was one of the highlights of the local production calendar.
As is often the case with ambitious creative work, not every sketch is a direct hit. At its most successful when it capitalises on non-indigenous ignorance, Black Comedy could do more to change perception than a dozen earnest documentaries. The Real Housewives of Narromine, featuring the comic stylings of Deborah Mailman, is an obvious but successful running joke. And Blackforce, the crack team that will revoke your race card if they catch you eating kale and driving a Prius, is a conceit worthy of Key and Peele (apologies – that would be another highly desirable hilarious show, running all through summer on the Comedy Channel).
Cameos from Matt Day, Brooke Satchwell, Sacha Horler and Brendan Cowell sharpen Black Comedy's already biting satire. Similarly, in the season final episodes of Parks and Recreation (Seven, Thursday, 11.30pm) the cameos continue to stack up. Michelle Obama's star turn so debilitated Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) her loud talking panic attack became one of the high points of this excellent series. It was not essential that Obama stole the thunder of other surprising guests: Joe Biden, John McCain, and serial cameo, Jon Hamm, but the First Lady nailed it. Buried away, so close to midnight, the finest comedy on air, free or expensive, remains a treat to record, rewatch, and use as a shield against the horrors of prime-time summer.
There will be hidden gems outside pay television in the long hot months ahead. Some of them may be hidden in the garden, or at the beach. They are most certainly not to be found in the company of 2 Broke Girls, or at a department store, or anywhere, dead or alive at Pemberley.
