This Week's TV with Dianne Butler

DIANNE Butler reviews your evening television for the week of Wednesday 2nd - Tuesday 8th November. 

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DIANNE Butler reviews your evening television this week.

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Wednesday 2nd
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Killing Time
TV1, Foxtel/Austar, 7.30pm
Rating: 4 Stars.

I AM wondering if Homer's Odyssey really is the best book to be taking with you into prison. Ideally, you'd want something big, and not just to hide your knife, the way Andrew Fraser has his stashed inside his copy of the Odyssey. He probably read a bit of Greek poetry, too.

Things clearly went awry for Fraser, the Melbourne lawyer whose story this is, but because his clients included a glittering roll call of stars who've featured brightly in the crime galaxy in recent history - people by the name of Moran and others - this series has had to contend with some legal issues.

At this stage only six of 10 episodes can screen because some people portrayed in it are involved in legal proceedings. I don't know why the series wasn't just held back, and then put to air as is. Like Blue Murder. One thing about the US, they have much more normal defamation laws.

Anyway, I would imagine those of you who watch Killing Time will be into it. Not just because of the kind of weird cachet that goes with these Melbourne families, but also because of Fraser's story, how one guy can go from here to there just like that.

David Wenham, who plays Fraser, and who's in so many scenes, pulls out a reliably strong performance. I don't think anyone expects anything else from Wenham now.

And I don't know how much of the series Lewis Moran ends up in, but Colin Friels has a nice take on him. Laconic almost, you know, given everything. "Ethics," he says to Fraser after he's shot someone in a pub, "I always thought was a county in England somewhere."

But you wait until you meet Kath Pettingill and her sons.

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Thursday 3rd
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My Sri Lanka with Peter Kuruvita
SBS ONE, 7.30pm
Rating: 3 Stars.

NORMALLY I'm opposed to animals in outfits, unless they're human animals, or monkeys in adorable onesies, such as the monkey at the start of My Sri Lanka tonight. It's only a glimpse, a tantalising glimpse, but I hope we'll meet the monkey again later.

I thought for a while that this was going to be a vanity show, heavy on nostalgia, light on actual cooking and local colour. Peter Kuruvita has returned to the country he lived in from age four to 12, and for the first six and a half minutes tells us about his parents and his childhood, and I kind of don't care. Even though Peter could scarcely be nicer.

But he is a chef, not a travel presenter or even just a TV personality, and so before long he gets his pans out. He makes three dishes tonight. They're all pretty easy, which they have to be for television, and also because he's doing them just standing there out in the open.

The first one is grilled banana prawns, with a black pepper and curry leaf sauce. "This is a sauce you have to cook down. It takes time," Peter says. Uh-oh. Nobody wants that. Do they? Or do they? Hard to know. It's not very difficult. The worst part's all the chopping. Gee, Peter's knife work is impressive.

And then he goes to see his nanny who looked after him when he was little. I know, it's practically Brideshead Revisited. He makes a breadfruit curry with her it looks fantastic.

And he makes a cashew curry at the end, for the full moon celebration where elephants are draped with pretty fabrics and so on. The curry is really for the priest, because cashews are expensive. Like every culture you can name, the person at the top of the religion gets the good stuff.

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Friday 4th
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Neighbours
Eleven, 6.30pm
Rating: 3 Stars.
NOAH. Noah Parkin. Problems or not? I've missed a few episodes of Neighbours lately (where's Bouncer?) and I'm not sure what's going on.

I love a stalker as much as the next girl, and the way he told those others he had a "present for his girlfriend" and, I don't know, that beanie ... pull it down and cut eye holes in it and suddenly Erinsborough's got a rapist/killer/kidnapper/pervert of whatever threat level. It won't though, will it. Probably not. It's not Summer Bay, after all, a place obliged by its name to have some dark days.

Noah (Orpheus Pledger) may be planning on spending the next four years growing dreadlocks, and he's bought the hat to accommodate them first.

Kate's scared of him anyway. I don't know why. But I'm wondering now if Kate isn't the unstable one. I mean, she lies to Lucas when Noah calls tonight, says it's no one. Which actually sounds like Noah if you say it quickly. Then she pretends it's Harold phoning about a shift. Lucas asks her didn't she have the day off, when obviously the real question is didn't Harold get washed off some rocks and die 20 years ago?

I had no idea how innovative Neighbours had become. I don't just mean the grocery lines they now sell in Daphne's coffee shop. No. I'm talking about the way Noah came up on a graphic on the screen, for our benefit, when he phoned Kate.

And I see John Wood's in the show. He's a golf-playing doctor (not one of the innovations I was talking about) whose leg is being humped by Rhys Lawson tonight. Rhys puts on a barbecue to try to oil his way into a surgical-training program, only there's a rat under the plate when he lifts the lid to put on the snapper. Vintage Neighbours. In the end credits it says animals were supplied by Animal Actors. It is a very Method rat.

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Saturday 5th
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CSI: NY
GEM, 8.30pm
Rating: 3 Stars.

I ALWAYS find it a bit incongruous how every episode of CSI: NY I've ever seen can have such a surreal start and then the rest of it turns to dust. Tonight's opens with a couple sitting in an empty apartment, it's like they've been drugged.

The guy can barely walk up the stairs. And they only decide to do that after they've sat smacked out or whatever for a while. They don't seem druggy but who would know?

The guy is Thomas Calabro, who true fans will know immediately as Dr Michael Mancini from the original and better Melrose Place, and also from the weaker remake. One of television's great medical practitioners.

So they struggle to the top of the stairs and open the door and ... that's all I'll say. On the fairly remote chance you're going to watch this show. It's not a terrible show though, just average. Terrible shame, after the promise of that beginning. Which may in itself be a reason not to watch it.

Dr Mancini is a dentist here. Charles Harris. He's married to Elizabeth, played by Helen Slater, who old people will remember from Supergirl.

She cries a lot. On account of their son Jeremy being missing for a week, and he's not the sort of boy to go off without telling his parents, and here it is just before his 19th birthday.

His parents had a strange, anonymous phone call directing them to this semi-finished apartment block.

Seven-hundred-and-thirty-eight stairs to the top where the dead person is located tonight. Developers went bust before they got around to the elevators. Quite the maggoty body too. It's enough to make the fragrant Sela Ward pull her nice blue cardigan up over her nose. Surely there's some sort of prophylactic available to these detectives?

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Sunday 6th
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Napoleon Dynamite
Eleven, 8.30pm.
Rating: 4 Stars.
By: Leigh paatsch

APPLYING the tag "one of a kind" to the undeniably unique Napoleon Dynamite does it a disservice, for this archly awkward comedy resides many universes away from anything seen at the movies before.

Napoleon Dynamite is so determined to keep its distance from convention that many will leave none the wiser about where it was coming from, or going.

I would be lying if I said I didn't hang on every last second of the blasted thing.

And Napoleon Dynamite doesn't even have a plot. Just a heroically uncool title character and the so-wrong-it's-right environment he lives in.

Napoleon (Jon Heder) is a mouth-breathing teenage misanthrope who talks with his eyes closed. A gangly geek who gets about in moon boots.

Even among the few fringe-dwellers prepared to tolerate him - such as possible best friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez) and possible girlfriend Deb (Tina Majorino) - Napoleon is a complete outsider.

Not that Napoleon cares. He's too busy keeping up unhappily oblivious appearances with such deadpan assurance you'll end up loving him as much as you pity him.

There are untold reasons to feel sorry for him. Take his family. Please. Older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) is a greasy-haired wimp who fancies himself as a chat-room Romeo. Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) is the kind of smooth operator who sells bust-enhancing cream for a living. Grandma (Sandy Martin) is missing in action after a dune buggy mishap. This is by no means a laugh-out-loud movie.

The humour extracted from Napoleon's minutely disturbing world is subtle to the point of almost vanishing. Some won't get the joke at all. Others will want the broadcast to go on forever.

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Monday 7th
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The Celebrity Apprentice
Channel 9, 7pm
Rating: 4 Stars.

I CAN'T quite decide which is the line of the series so far on The Celebrity Apprentice. I think it's either, "This is not a pageant" or "I'm not honey", both delivered by Mark Bouris. The first one was to Jesinta Campbell on the opening night, the second to Deni Hines after the girls' KFC debacle.

I wonder if I should have called him Mr Bouris just then? Probably. Even Max Markson calls him Mr Bouris.

They're right into it. They have to be if they want to win it and get that hundred grand for their favourite charity. Well, not their favourite charity exactly. That would be themselves with some of these people. Second favourite.

That KFC episode, that's been the highlight for me so far. Among what have obviously been many highlights. Can we just talk about the surprises here for a moment? Starting with Shane Crawford. Has he ever in his life eaten KFC? Not going by the way he was yelling out "Come and eat the food!" in a slightly uncertain voice.

But they raised almost $27,000 versus the lousy $2300 the women scraped together.

I saw Didier at the Australia's Next Top Model final at the Opera House. He had on a blue three-piece suit. He was more beautiful than anyone else in the room. Including Montana. People were talking about The Celebrity Apprentice, saying wasn't it a good thing so-and-so said no to going on it, and blah blah, but I think they had to have some lower-wattage types in the mix to bring out the full Lord of the Flies effect. Would we have seen a bossy Pauline Hanson if Jesinta or Polly hadn't been there? No.

Pauline's running for public office again, isn't she? She acts as if she's just taking a break, as if Parliament's not sitting or something.

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Tuesday 8th
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Modern Family
Ten, 7.30pm
Rating: 4 Stars
By: Andrew Fenton

THANK God for Christopher Lloyd, I say. No, not the crazy wild-haired guy from Back to the Future - the guy who helped develop Frasier into one of the smartest shows on television and co-created the all-conquering Modern Family. He's like the anti-Chuck Lorre (Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory).

Lorre has refined the classic sitcom and done it well: flat studio lighting and lots of world-weary zingers with set-ups and punchlines you can spot a mile off. But Modern Family is a fresh take. It's almost as smart as Frasier, but has much wider appeal. Much of this is thanks to the show portraying a wide variety of relationships and because the comedy itself comes out of well-drawn characters rather than mere one-liners.

The mockumentary format also gives the writers freedom to throw in brief but funny, stand-alone snippets that would be difficult in a single set studio sitcom - such as tonight when diet-crazed Cameron (Eric Stonestreet) rips off a cupboard door in an irrational fit of anger, or when Jay (Ed O'Neill) showers with his beloved dog.

That's two of the five subplots right there - the "juice fast" madness threatens to derail partner Mitchell's work function and Jay's hot-wife-with-an-impenetrable-accent Gloria becomes jealous of his relationship with his dog.

Meanwhile, nerdy Alex and the dumb, yet popular Haley bicker after being put in the same maths class, mum Claire takes issue with a parking inspector and hapless dad Phil decides to realise his childhood dream of tightrope walking.

Even though the three family stories barely intersect tonight, the individual subplots are all very funny. And I'm happy to take that over narrative cohesion any day.