Offspring, Celebrity Apprentice and Beavis & Butthead return as Eastbound & Down shines

IT'S a huge week of television, but there's no need to waste time with boring shows - Di Butler has sorted out which are worth a look.

offspring

DI Butler reviews 21 shows - three for every night of the week - and tells you which ones to tune in for and which ones to switch off.

offspring

Wednesday, April 18

OFFSPRING, Ch 10, 8.30pm

HOW lovely for Nina she has a new boyfriend. It's not Matthew Le Nevez's fault he once played Matthew Wales who killed half his family in The Society Murders, but sometimes when I look at Dr Patrick Reid, I think he's about to have a flashback and decide to poison her risotto.

But so far they're happy. Too happy, as far as Nina (Asher Keddie) is concerned. Whereas Billie and Mick have stopped having sex now they're married. It was their wedding where Cherie did her blood-type map and figured Nina's father isn't John Waters.

Rating: 3.5/5

CELEBRITY APPRENTICE, Ch 9, 8pm

CHARLOTTE Dawson. (Hilarious.) Dicko. (Same.) Nathan Jolliffe from Amazing Race. Tania Zaetta. David Hasselhoff. Jason Akermanis. (I'm saying it: I love Aker. My shoulders'll get sore carrying this group, he says at the start.) And more. What Celebrity Apprentice doesn't have, I don't care, because it has an acute sense of its own inanity. Or Mark Mr Bouris hasn't, but the rest of it.

Rating: 3/5

WAG NATION, Arena, 9.30pm

THE DVD cover has half of the WAGs with their leg sticking out, a la Angelina Jolie at the Academy Awards. The line-up: Terry Biviano and Jana Peterson (representing rugby league), Lynette Bolton and Jackie Spong (AFL), Chantelle Raleigh (basketball). Chantelle lives at home with her parents and sisters. "Maybe we could be called the blonde Kardashians." One episode in: dumb and boring.

Rating: 1.5 stars

Glee

Thursday, April 19

GLEE, CH 10, 7.30pm

EVERYONE said Quinn was going to die, but, really, it's not Glee's style to kill someone off. Anyone. And not Quinn. On her way to a wedding where she's the chief bridesmaid. Bit of a rort though. Plus what else are they going to do with her? She's a cheerleader again. She's had sex. A baby. Cut her hair.

Time to get your shine on! Some major disco tonight. Disco Inferno, in fact. And plenty of Bee Gees. And while I'd pay money to see Puck in Saturday Night Fever pants, it's going to be hard to top Matt Bomer's star turn last week.

Rating: 3.5/5

BEAVIS & BUTTHEAD, MTV, 10pm

FIRST new episode in 14 years, and Beavis cries. Or that's what Butthead's telling everyone. It was really the onion he'd pulled out of his chili dog, but it was during The Bachelor, so obviously it's a confusing time. Clearly he's not a crier. They saw Twilight Eclipse earlier and sneered at it but emerged resolved to get bitten by a werewolf and become one of the undead. Cue furry homeless man with hepatitis.

Rating: 3/5

SWAMP PEOPLE, 7MATE, 7.30pm

I LOVE how it says at the start that the way of life here goes back 300 years. Clearly the era is predentistry. The tone is hillbilly, only not in the hills, with the alligators referred to as prehistoric monsters. I think I have that the right way around. Hard to understand how none of the hunters has been eaten yet, the risks they take. Still, two more weeks of open season to go.

Rating: 2/5

Friday, April 20

MISS FISHER'S MURDER MYSTERIES, ABC1, 8.30pm

NOT quite the tipsy lingerie confection you've become accustomed to. Phryne Fisher's Flower Maidens are underage school girls and while they're in the 1920s, a fabulously liberal time for so many, we're here now, when it isn't. Flower Maidens? It's some festival, you'll see. Let's not examine this too closely or we may find this show is actually unwatchable rubbish. Tonight's victim is really a victim - used, discarded, killed on a beach. Inspector Jack Robinson can't talk to girls so Miss Fisher is called in to translate.

Rating: 2.5/5

BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS, Ch 7, 7.30pm

I WONDER if Kerri-Anne Kennerley regrets going on Dancing With the Stars now that she has to open up her house to the viewers of Better Homes and Gardens. Of course, I say "has to", but maybe she's happy about it. Maybe it's not in her contract. Maybe she'll get a new kitchen out of it. Tara Dennis installs one tonight - it arrives in a box, takes her just over five minutes.

Rating: 2.5/5

O.J. SIMPSON, Bio Channel, Foxtel/Austar, 9.30pm

I LOVED the Tiger Woods stuff, but there's nothing like O.J. Simpson. This show is only an hour long, nowhere near enough to properly cover the golden career of one of American football's great running backs, the movies, the murder of Nicole Simpson Brown and Ron Goldman, the chase in his white Ford Bronco, and his jailing in 2008 for armed robbery. Sensational.

Rating: 3/5

Saturday, April 21

FIVE DAYS, ABC1, 9.20pm

MY prediction is this will grip you from the start. Baby in a pram, someone walks up and carts it away in a bit of a hurry. Public place. We don't see who takes it. At the same time a woman and her mother drive to a commuter carpark - where a pair of cheeky lads on bikes give them lip - to catch a train. They have an appointment, it's important, but the train has to stop on the way. Reason being: death. We'll meet those boys again too. And that baby. I hope the rest of the series, which stars Suranne Jones, is as dramatic as tonight.

Rating: 4/5

NEW TRICKS, ABC1, 7.30pm

ANOTHER reasonable episode in what is so far a reliable season. The crew is under pressure to bring in a serial rapist who also looks good for an old murder - of Kathy Green, found drugged in her van outside her market stall. Kathy also had a stressful family situation, which may be related. It's resonating with Detective Pullman - her mother (played by Sheila Hancock) is visiting and driving her round the bend.

Rating: 3/5

MY GREAT BIG ADVENTURE, ABC3, 11am

THERE are fun times and there are hard times, the boy with the faux-hawk is saying. Steady on, dude. You're bringing me down and I'm not even in your whatever-age demographic.

Friends. The most important thing in our life. "Right?" Um, I guess. Unless it's our hair. And as Kayne Tremills finds out during the course of this episode on Friendship, to have friends you've got to be a friend.

Rating: 2/5

Sunday, April 22

TOUCH, Ch 10, 8.30pm

AIRPORT + unaccompanied phone + Kiefer Sutherland = intrigue. Is that the formula? It's a formula. Not the one you're maybe thinking of. But there is a September 11 element to Touch. Kiefer plays Martin Bohm, an ex-journalist whose stockbroker wife was in the World Trade Centre when it came down, leaving him with only a large trust fund to raise their difficult son Jake. I say difficult because he doesn't speak or let anyone come near him. But gee he's good with numbers. This is part homage to the digital age, part emotional family drama, part hocus-pocus.

Rating: 3.5/5

TWO ON THE GREAT DIVIDE, ABC1, 7.30pm

JOHN Doyle - funny. Tim Flannery - beardy. So I'm concerned when it's Flannery who goes for the massage and Doyle who goes to the palm reader when they stop in Daylesford during the opening leg of their trip. Great Divide refers to the range and to people's views on things. They start at Dinosaur Cove in southern Victoria, take in a range of attractions along the way and wind up at Mt Bogong in vile weather.

Rating: 3/5

BONES, Ch 7, 9pm

SO this baby is definitely Booth's? They were leery about having a drink in the same bar the last time I saw this show. Bones wants a home birth, but she's privy to an interior world of infection many of us don't have access to, so I can understand this. And this is TV, so we all know where the birth will actually take place - in the car on the way to somewhere.

Rating: 2.5/5

Monday, April 23

REVENGE, Ch 7, 8.30pm

I THINK we all knew that dog was going to be a problem. He's about to rip fake Emily's throat out tonight when Jack arrives with some breakfast treat and distracts him. Jack's so addled with happiness or something he doesn't think the dog's behaviour is at all odd. Meanwhile the real Emily, who isn't real but for our purposes is, walks into Jack's bar and the dog's all over her. She's between lunch with a perilously lonely Victoria (lawyering up for her hostile divorce) and dinner with Daniel and his Japanese-speaking potential investor. Emily translates, it's like watching Iron Chef.

Rating: 3.5/5

EASTBOUND & DOWN, Showcase, Foxtel/Austar, 8.30pm

THE show of the week. Disgraced major league baseballer Kenny Powers (Danny McBride) is trying to work his way back. First it was coaching a high school team, then playing in Mexico, and now, as season three starts, pitching for the minor league Myrtle Beach Merman. Tonight's highlights: Will Ferrell as a psychotic car dealer, Jason Sudeikis as Kenny's teammate Shane, and the unkillable Kenny himself.

Rating: 4.5/5

AUSTRALIA'S GOT TALENT, Ch 7, 7.30pm

I'M going to really need Kyle to bring it tonight. He can do it. It's one thing for Brian McFadden to talk, via Seven press release, about "jelly-wrestling midgets", but where's Kyle's offensive riposte? Huh? I just hope he hasn't been neutered and is just pacing himself, old-school Vegas-style. I just hope I can make it through these early rounds to see him come good. Those auditions drive me crazy.

Rating: 2/5

Tuesday, April 24

THE BLOCK, Ch 9, 7pm

ARE those houses legal? Not that we care. Tonight is one of those challenges they like doing on this show. None of us likes them though, am I right? We just want to see the other stuff. The hammering and the yelling. They've only got 10 weeks, you'd think there'd be enough to do. They're chasing $40,000 tonight, and the right to maybe move into a different house if they feel like it. Lara and Brad, who work for the mining company, are in the biggest house, so they're nervous. They all are. Hopefully those Mitre 10 shirts will be of some comfort.

Rating: 2.5/5

GAME OF THRONES, Showcase, Foxtel/Austar, 8.30pm

I FIND it hard to go past anything with a wolf in it. Or a decapitated head in someone's saddle. But that was last week, and tonight it's just the usual family hatred and recriminations. Tyrion and Cersei are at each other - issues over their mother's death, and Tyrion working for the hideous boy king Joffrey. And Arya's in peril after coming out as a girl. She is a girl.

Rating: 3/5

PARENTHOOD, Ch 7, 9.30pm

A MILLION dollars doesn't seem nearly enough money for Adam and Crosby to sell their boutique recording studio to one over-burdened with cash and ego, but then Adam's an unfulfilled bore of limited thought. Crosby's off camping in a leaking tent, clearly a metaphor. Meanwhile their sisters are going mad pursuing babies, through all avenues. Also a metaphor. It all ends in tears tonight.

Rating: 2/5