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My Kitchen Rules, Seven, 7.30pm
The fifth season of Channel Seven’s cooking strip show has had its share of scandal, with two of its aproned blokes exposed for allegedly dubious financial dealings, and one of its star judges accused of suggesting that people feed meaty broth to infants. But the circus has rolled merrily on, the usual grand set-ups resulting in abject failure often enough to keep us gleefully tuning in.
Law & Order: SVU, Ten, 8.30pm
Concerning the timely issue of domestic violence, this instalment of the best of Dick Wolf’s crime series spin-offs, now in its 18th season, is typically slick, gripping from the start and leaves dangling a big, ugly question mark. The case, for Detective Olivia Benson (the magnificent Mariska Hargitay, on her own since Christopher Meloni’s departure last season), seems sewn up, given the assault in question, of a woman by her sports-star husband, was captured on camera and broadcast on social media. But as Olivia discovers, hard evidence in a domestic violence case is sometimes not enough to convict a man. The case polarises the squad, who are forced to examine their own position on an issue that still has apparently grey areas, despite cold, hard facts. Few other US police-beat series do courtroom drama as well as SVU, and the morality war played out in that arena tonight gives fascinating insight into the psyches of both the abuser and the abused.
Parenthood (Season final), Seven, 10pm
Opening with the device that is the hallmark of this inter-generational family drama series – several generations talking over the top of each other in an opulent domestic setting – the conclusion to the sixth, typically fraught season delivers the anticipated tears, shocks, happy endings, and more frenetic dialogue. Tonight, single new mother, Amber (Mae Whitman) faces homelessness and destitution when the business venture of Adam (Peter Krause) and Crosby (Dax Shepard), teeters. Hank (Ray Romano) asks patriarch Zeek (Craig T. Nelson) for permission to marry his daughter, Sarah (Lauren Graham), in a touching exchange. Hank’s fellow Asperger’s sufferer, teenaged Max (Max Burkholder), appoints himself wedding photographer. And there is a shocking turn of events before the credits roll that renders the cast momentarily speechless.
Bridget McManus
PAY TV
The Hal Lindsey Report, Daystar, 7.30pm
One Evangelical Christian channel clearly wasn’t enough. Now Foxtel is bringing us Daystar, an American televangelist network with an apocalyptic Christian Zionist flavour. Daystar is obsessed with Israel because the Jewish state has a pivotal place in certain Christian Zionist beliefs about the End Times. Hence the weekly Israeli news magazine show Israel NOW News (Sunday, 2.30pm) and the channel’s assortment of Christian Zionist preachers like Hal Lindsey, who has been warning the end is nigh since, well ... since before he penned the 1970 bestseller The Late, Great Planet Earth. Back then he was convinced that the Soviet Union would lead us into Armageddon; these days he’s sure that climate scientists will. On one recent episode of The Hal Lindsey Report he explained that climate change is a satanic hoax that will – with a little help from the Pope – enable the UN to form a totalitarian global government that will take control of your birth control and bring on the rise of the antichrist. That’s one way of looking at it.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
Margin Call (2011), SBS Two, 8.30pm
In the films of J.C. Chandor terrible things are coming. Financial ruin looms for an ambitious immigrant in the recent A Most Violent Year; the slow sinking of a damaged yacht unfolds in All is Lost; and in his first feature the imminent collapse of the mortgage-backed securities market that will lead to the Global Financial Crisis strikes a Wall Street investment bank. In Chandor’s films individuals have to confront forces that are seemingly beyond their control, or even comprehension. As word of the untenable investments filters upwards in Margin Call, from a junior risk analyst (Zachary Quinto) to department heads (Paul Bettany, Kevin Spacey) and then business titans (Simon Baker, Jeremy Irons), there’s disbelief at where their institutional power has brought them, followed by a brutal willingness to pass the almost detonated bomb to unwary hands. Chandor doesn’t assign blame for the GFC, but he reveals the pathology of the crisis, a world of sterilised office towers and corrosively boundless money.
True Confessions (1981), stan.com.au
As written by the husband and wife team of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, adapting the latter’s 1977 novel, True Confessions has some pithy and astute scenes about the rituals of work and power, whether it’s two homicide detectives cracking wise as they work a crime scene or a Catholic cardinal and his deputy marking the card of a lucrative contributor. Set in post-war 1940s Los Angeles – the film exists as a missing link between Chinatown and L.A. Confidential – True Confessions is the story of Tom (Robert Duvall) and Des Spellacy (Robert De Niro), brothers who occupy positions in the two key Irish-American professions: the police force and priesthood. Both are tainted by their association with a gangster turned construction magnate, Jack Amsterdam (Charles Durning): Tom was a bagman for his brothels, while Desmond now awards school construction contracts to his company at cost rate. Neither can accept his status, with Tom chafing while Des simmers, and there’s a breathtaking scene where Tom reminds Amsterdam, in front of Des, of their former connection. The murder of a young woman, in a manner that suggests the Black Dahlia case, brings the murkiness to the surface, but director Ulu Grosbard can’t find the connective tissue to tie to the case to the pair’s unease, with De Niro unable to illuminate his character’s spiritual malaise. But the film does make good use of the confession box: as a place to both tell and seek the truth.
Craig Mathieson