New Year's couch potato style: Videos that shaped the '80s, NYE video hits and more

NEW Year's without the queues and booze tops the week's TV, plus a brilliant Rose Byrne performance and and a "real" funny family.

Sarah Richardson

SWITCHED On writer Holly Byrnes reviews your weekly evening television.

Wednesday, December 28
Damages
W Channel, 7.30pm
Rating: 4 Stars

IT'S a bit too early for Australia Day-style patriotism, but can we talk about Rose Byrne?

Sure, it may seem every other day you read about another talented young actor from our shores making it over in the US of A.

Like Rachael Taylor did this year on Charlie's Angels, flying the flag for hot blondes and packing heat on the reboot of the iconic 1970s series.

Yes, she was sizzling alongside her crime-fighting, butt-kicking co-stars.

It's just that the fans (and some of the critics) weren't convinced, with the show axed unceremoniously midway through the first season.

So it makes the five-season haul of Byrne on Damages even more impressive, purely for surviving the jungle that is Hollywood. But mere survival is not enough, with the actor building a reputation as a seriously talented young artist well equipped to keep up with her bigger name co-stars like Glenn Close (as lead Patty Hewes).

Byrne has held her own playing lawyer Ellen Parsons, with each season written around her character's work within law firm, Hewes & Associates. In this episode, she is fighting the good fight - attempting to protect a key witness in the wrongful death suit she is leading against a US prison contractor in Afghanistan.

It is a more confident, less naive Parsons who meets the messenger of Chris Sanchez (Chris Messina), who is being held and tortured by those she seeks to expose in the Middle East. Tensions are high, helped along for the viewer with a series of flashbacks.

Byrne is brilliant in this role, which despite this season being the show's last, will be an impressive sizzle reel for when she moves on to the next big project.

Tough Nuts

Thursday, December 29
Tough Nuts: Australia's Hardest Criminals
CI Channel, 6.30pm
Rating: 3 Stars

THERE have been a few portraits of Sydney crime king, the late George Freeman.

Penning his autobiography in 1988, the man himself admitted to getting a rough start in life, which led to petty crimes and several stints in the violent world of the NSW juvenile justice system.

The extent of that horror period has only just been revealed with an ABC investigation this month exposing the abuse physical, sexual and psychological meted out at an institution for boys in Tamworth.

When Channel 9's Underbelly franchise turned its attention to Freeman's reign in A Tale Of Two Cities, it was former Flying Doctors star Peter O'Brien who showcased him as a violent standover man who ordered killings but kept his hands clean of the drug trade.

He had all the trimmings of the American-style mafioso: white suits, gold jewellery, flash cars and fast women.

In Tough Nuts: Australia's Hardest Criminals, the producers paint Freeman as a man who lived up to his potential as an accomplished crook, into SP booking, illegal casinos and money laundering.

Actor Danny Adcock plays Freeman, recreating some of his most violent encounters in the late 1970s and 1980s.

More compelling are the interviews with real players from the period, interspersed between the action, especially with crime reporter Bob Bottom, credited with exposing the shonky dealings between Freeman and the authorities he was paying off.

Rather than dying in a blaze of gunfire or rotting in a prison cell, Freeman's end in 1990 is a less dramatic one suffering a drug-induced asthma attack, aged 55.

my family

Friday, December 30
My Family
ABC1, 8pm
Rating: 3 Stars

IF you take Kim Kardashian out of the picture, TV marriages have never looked more realistic.

Long ago, those watching at home were confronted with images of the perfect partner who looked nothing like the he or she sitting next to them on the couch.

Think Mike and Carol Brady, who combined their two clans on The Brady Bunch, without the need for a Family Court-appointed mediator.

Or Marion and Howard Cunningham, her tied up in apron strings, him dishing out fatherly advice his kids took seriously.

In 2011, thanks to shows such as Modern Family, Offspring and Packed to the Rafters, parents come in packages that are less than perfect. And don't we love them for it.

Take Modern Family's Phil and Claire Dunphey, raising three children with all their flaws and fumbles.

Ditto, same-sex parents Mitchell and Cameron on the same show, whose enthusiasm for raising daughter Lily more often than not makes up for their ineffectiveness.

Trying your best is what it boils down to; forget what the guide books say is the take-home message. Which brings us to Ben and Sarah Harper, the husband and wife in BBC comedy series My Family.

Middle-class dentist Ben (Robert Lindsay) and tour guide Sarah (Zoe Wanamaker) bitch and moan, snark and snipe at each other constantly.

When she signs the couple up to a new age marriage retreat, the laughs are sure to follow.

Thrown out of the course, the couple return home pledging new vows.

His: "I will never stop finding new ways to annoy you", and hers: "To mock you mercilessly at every turn".

Sounds like domestic bliss to me.

Saturday, December 31
New Year's Eve
Channel 9, 8.30pm
Rating: 4 Stars

ALCOHOL-free zones. Taxi queues. Christmas hangovers. New-shoe blisters. Crowd claustrophobia. Party performance anxiety.

Now tell me the TV telecast on New Year's Eve isn't a lot more tempting than actually being out and about and part of it? With every passing year, the pressure to make NYE the best night ever only grows. But, if you are anything like me, this is in equal proportion to your antipathy toward doing battle with public transport, parking police, road closures, not to mention hopped-up Gen Y revellers being far too happy and bright for their own good.

That's not to say you can't party at home: complete with silly hats, over-priced alcohol and, bonus, leftover ham. If you've got small kids, watching all the fun from the family-friendly safety of your own couch is even better.

Am I right, mums and dads?

This year, there's even more incentive for the kids, big and small, with The Muppets Movie stars Kermit the Frog and actor Jason Segel signed on as the night's guests, launching the 9pm family fireworks on Channel 9.

From 9.15pm, Today show reporter Richard Wilkins has programmed two hours of 2011 music video hits.

Anchoring Nine's telecast is Celebrity Apprentice revelation Jesinta Campbell, alongside Weekend Today host Cameron Williams.

Add performances by The Potbelleez and David Campbell, live from the Sydney Lord Mayor's harbourside event, and things will be jumping.

The broadcast will cross to hot party spots around Australia and the world: a trip that won't require you to queue or cost next month's mortgage payment in entry fees.

Now that's a happy way to see in a new year.

Freddie Mercury

Sunday, January 1
The Videos That Shaped The '80s
ABC2, 7.30pm
Rating: 4 Stars

HANGOVER has you in its death grip on the couch after another New Year's large?

This retrospective on the best videos from the 1980s is both the perfect soundtrack, with minimum brain power required, and bloody good fun.

For the MTV generation, this is the ultimate company to keep on January 1 now that Video Hits is no more. The emergence of the music video opened up a whole new genre for film-makers and artists. You didn't listen to a new song, you watched it.

The stories behind seminal anthems such as Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, Bon Jovi's Living On A Prayer and Boomtown Rats' I Don't Like Mondays are as compelling as the music itself.

For former Channel 7 cameraman Russell Mulcahy, music videos provided his big break into the world of film-making.

The Melbourne-born director was behind the lens for the first video featured on MTV, ironically The Buggles' Video Killed The Radio Star.

But it was directing the video Vienna, by Ultravox, that proved to be his future calling card for other artists including Duran Duran and Elton John.

That big break almost didn't happen. Confusing Vienna for Venice, he watched as his pitch to have the band arrive on gondolas was met with panicked looks from record company management.

He showed more initiative working on Duran Duran's Rio video, realising after the film crew had returned to London that more vision of John Taylor mock-playing the saxophone would be needed.

Borrowing the handycam of a German tourist, Mulcahy got the frames he needed, took them back to edit, then posted the camera back to its owner.

Monday, January 2
Gossip Girl,
Fox8, 6.30pm
Rating: 3 Stars

BESIDES the delicious bites of gossip in our newspapers, there's nothing that gets a town in a tail spin more than a full serve of thinly veiled spite in the form of a novel by "Anonymous".

Full of "guess who, don't sue" swipes, with names changed to protect the guilty and the author from legal action, they are literary gold sold on innuendo alone.

Channel 9 was skewered in one a few years back when Boned picked over the wounded network.

Then there was The Bride Stripped Bare, a shocking story of a desperate London housewife with a fondness for random sex acts with mini-cab drivers.

It didn't take long to out the author as Australian writer Nikki Gemmell, who used the notoriety to launch her publishing career.

And hitting the shelves this month is a new title, Strictly Confidential, by Sydney publicity queen Roxy Jacenko, dishing the dirt on the local media and society scene.

Perfectly timed too with what's happening on Gossip Girl, where those Upper Eastsiders are discovering Dan Humphrey packs a punch with his pen in a saucy new novel.

All the gang feature but, of course, they're all too busy being fabulous to actually read it (until their minions do it for them). Cue fireworks.

For bride-to-be Blair, it could spell the end of her nuptials to Grimaldi prince Louis, who had previously tried to stop the press to save his NY princess the scandal.

Serena's ties to Dan present a work opportunity, when her producer boss demands she use her friendship to score the film rights to the book.

Meanwhile, Nate's relationship with "cougar" Diane (Elizabeth Hurley) remains a secret he'd like to tell.

Sarah Richardson

Tuesday, January 3
Sarah's Summer House
LifeStyle Home, 6pm
Rating: 3 Stars

SARAH Richardson is the kind of woman you really want to hate.

Canada's answer to Martha Stewart, she appears to have the kind of seamless, chic life you'd pay good money for if only you could ship her in with her glue gun and her colour swatches and her contractors who always finish their work on time.

We've seen her buy under-priced, clapped-out terrace homes on railway lines, with wood rot and depressing basements, and within weeks convert them into multi-million dollar, must-have mansions.

So I'm not sure whether her new summer series is going to make you love her more or fill you with homicidal envy.

The focus of her latest makeover show is a stunning island cottage, which she picked up as a package deal with her handsome husband, Alexander.

To add to the fantasy island experience, Sarah is six months' pregnant and glowing her way through a seriously complex renovation, smile and style intact.

The only sign of baby brain is the slip-up last episode when she ordered the wrong glass panels, but in the scheme of things it's not enough for us to crucify her. Pity.

With the stunning lounge room extension complete and gleaming in nautical shades of calming blue and white, her attention now turns to two guest bedrooms.

When she lunges for a nauseatingly loud floral print, pint-sized offsider Tommy tuts his disapproval. He's deeply invested in whether the recycled panelling works out or she, horror, goes for the council-green colour palette.

She does. And it works beautifully, with a mix of natty detailing and family nostalgia.

Don't you just hate happy endings sometimes?