Beau Ryan leads the way in The Amazing Race Australia

Restless Australians stuck at home due to COVID-19 can live vicariously through The Amazing Race.

Former NRL star Beau Ryan hosts The Amazing Race Australia.

Eddie Cockrell picks the Free-to-air, Pay TV and Streaming highlights this week.

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The dramatic pathos of a portaloo has been close to the heart of Australians since Shane Jacobsen played the titular lead in the early naughties smash hit mockumentary Kenny, and it similarly plays a central role in the very Australian and very entertaining new season of The Amazing Race Australia.

For those still unfamiliar with the format of The Amazing Race franchise, the show is hosted by tremendously likeable former NRL star Beau Ryan, who is joined by 14 duos with hashtagable team names, competing for a $250,000 cash prize. Each leg involves a series of challenges; the Route Marker, which must be completed as a team, a Roadblock, during which one team member must complete alone, and a detour, a choice between two tasks based on very little information. A few fresh rules have been thrown in for good measure, but perhaps the freshest and most challenging is the world-first requirement that all teams complete two weeks mandatory hotel quarantine in Queensland before even hitting the starting blocks.

With COVID-19 sidelining the itinerary of exotic destinations that typically make up the passport stamps in a standard season, this year’s race unfolds within and around Australia. And unapologetically Australian it is: The race kicks off in North Queensland with teams riding in tinnies to deliver schooners of beer and peel prawns, progressing in the subsequent episodes to, among others, surf lifesaving, synchronised swimming and the aforementioned and unmissable portable dunny race.

It’s a wonderful thing to watch what the lure of money and infamy will draw out in the human spirit, and exhibit A is the insufferably smug and dismissive self-styled power couple Holly and Dolor. Hubris can be dangerous, and their confidence that a supposedly superior intellect and athleticism will quickly sweep them to the front is wonderfully juxtaposed with their failure to demonstrate either of these skills. At the other end of the spectrum are parents-of-three postie Shane and fighter Deb, from New South Wales. As is true for many, the pandemic has not been kind to their financial circumstances, yet they throw themselves into every challenge with delight, and the prizemoney would be not just well deserved but a welcome relief.

It was only a matter of time before “influencers” found their way into society’s every echelon and stepping into this role are Gold Coast glamazons Ashleigh and Amanda.

Rounding out the pleasingly diverse cast are plenty of genuinely powerful couples, among others the fabulously deadly indigenous cousins Dwes and Katherine, droll Islanders Jessica and her best friend Sefa, South Sudanese refugees and now successful young women Malaan and Tina, super Sikhs Jaskirat and Anurag, champion cowboys Jackson and Brendon, and food truck-owning Filipino migrants’, father and daughter Jobelle and Rani.

Circumstance has given new urgency and relevance to this concept: now, more than ever, The Amazing Race is a show where restless Australians stuck at home can live vicariously through these adventurers.

The Amazing Race Australia, Monday, 7:30pm, Ten and WIN Network

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The Picks

Holey Moley (Alison Booth)
Monday-Wednesday, 7.30pm, Seven and 7Plus

“A serious competition put in a really silly world,” is how Aussie format creator Chris Culvenor describes Holey Moley, and if the humble proletariat recreational activity — OK, call it sport if you must —of miniature golf had to receive the gladiatorially enhanced reality show treatment, first stateside and now here, it could’ve turned out a lot worse than this cheerful and cheeky hour. The show seems to take structural inspiration from the second half of the landmark American mockumentary Best in Show, in which a pair of commentators, here American comedian Rob Riggle from the original and our own athlete-presenter Matt Shirvington describe the action in front of them with an increasingly surreal gravitas. That action consists of average Australians competing alongside moderately established athletes on a supersized Brisbane course that includes such obstacles as Dutch Courage, Putt the Plank and, lest anyone doubt the show’s commitment to the ridiculous, a space-themed corner dubbed Uranus—“everyone’s favourite hole”. The eventual winner will take home$100,000, but forget the money: the more Holey Moley embraces its absurdity, the funnier it becomes.

Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies
Thursday, 9.20pm, SBS Viceland and SBS On Demand

From Marrickville’s championship swimmer Annette Kellerman, whose nude scene in the now-lost 1916 American silent film A Daughter of the Gods set tongues wagging, to the unclothed wrestling sequence between Sacha Baron Cohen and Ken Davitian in Borat 90 years later, this borderline explicit yet respectful and inclusive 130-minute documentary visits many people behind and in front of the camera who are known as much for what they’ve shown the world as the talent that got them there. The movie is framed around the advent of the #MeToo movement and establishment of on-set “Intimacy Co-ordinators” who work with actors to respect each other during delicate sequences. Emphasized by numerous actresses who gained fame for their nude work is the dramatic importance of such scenes: “I don’t want to be the pair of boobs for that distribution deal,” says actress E.G. Daily, whose films include 1983 teen romantic comedy Valley Girl, “I want to be the pair of boobs ‘cause it matters to the scene.” Director Danny Wolf and co-writer Paul Fishbeincherish their Hollywood history; this eye-opening survey is a guilty pleasure.

Travel Guides: Aussie Events Series
Wednesday, 7.30pm, Nine and 9Now

As border restrictions continue to ebb and flow, the three-year-old Nine Network production Travel Guides has mischievously reminded Australians what’s waiting to be discovered or re-experienced as this pandemic mess eases. Thus far in this fourth series, the groups of amateur travel critics have explored and analysed the same accommodations, food and local attractions in Byron Bay, the Red Centre and the tropical Whitsundays with the wit, enthusiasm and panache that has become the hallmark of the series. These excursions may be revisited via their 9Now online portal, but aren’t necessary to enjoy this week’s week-long journey to wintry Tasmania. Once there, newbies Matt and Brett, “holiday snobs” Kevin and Janetta, the Fren Family, Stack and Mel the identical twin cowgirls and trio of suburban Millennials move from the bawdy underthings and truffles of Hobart’s Salamanca Markets to the western coast and northern Cradle Mountains in search of all that Tassie has to offer. This quirky show ensures an hour of laughs and a stirring of wanderlust.

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Pay TV/Streaming

Tomer Sisley and Helene de Fougerolles star in TV crime show Balthazar, which is finally making its debut in Australia.

Criminally long wait over for drama lovers

The embattled and anguished medico is a staple of television drama – think DeForest Kelley’s Dr Leonard “Bones” McCoy from Star Trek, Alan Alda’s Hawkeye Pierce from M*A*S*H, Hugh Laurie’s Dr Gregory House in House and Sandra Oh’s Dr Cristina Yang from Grey’s Anatomy. And that’s just for starters.

Newly prominent on this list is Israeli-French actor and comedian Tomer Sisley, who stars as gifted and commensurately eccentric Parisian forensic pathologist Dr Raphael Balthazar in the hit French TV crime procedural that bears his surname. Now awaiting its fourth season since the 2018 debut on France’s free-to-air TF1 channel, the show makes a belated but welcome Australian debut on the Acorn TV streaming service.

“Well, from the looks of it, he seems to be dead,” Balthazar says drily at a crime scene in the opening minutes of the first episode in the six hours that comprise the first season (there are 25 in total to date). He’s speaking to newly appointed chief inspector Helene Bach (Helene de Fougerolles), a by-the-book cop who balances troubles at home with straying husband Antoine (Aliocah Itovich) and two rebellious teenage kids (Gabriel Caballero, Aminthe Audiard) with a seemingly never-ending procession of unusually placed corpses that forms the backbone of the show.

For his part, Balthazar also walks a fine line: at work. He’s a piercingly intelligent yet highly individualistic physician and investigator, with a vague reputation as a ladies’ man (think a mid-1980s-era Bruce Springsteen with Gallic spice) who tools around Paris at high speeds in a robin’s egg blue 1966 French Alpine roadster, and interrupts a skydiving jaunt to attend a crime scene. (In real life, Sisley enjoys extreme sports as well). “I wanted to be a doctor to mend bodies,” he tells Helene, “I became a forensic doctor to mend souls.”

Twelve years earlier, Balthazar’s tattoo artist partner Lise Castel (Pauline Cheviller) was brutally murdered on the floor of their loungeroom. She materialises at key moments in his investigations to discuss ongoing cases, their physically disrupted yet spiritually ongoing relationship, and at least one woman the pathologist lures back to the flat who flees when she finds explicit crime scene photos on the coffee table. As the show progresses, Balthazar becomes resolute in his quest to find her killer.

So, too, do the victims of the imaginatively conceived murders in each hour advise Balthazar from the sidelines, rendering him somewhat of a corpse whisperer.

“Mind you, he’s brilliant,” says steadfastly supportive morgue off-sider Fatim (Philypa Phoenix) to colleague Eddy (Come Levin), “but he’s also a pain in the neck.” Says someone else: he’s “nutty as a fruitcake.”

Thus is the quietly crusading Balthazar established as an idiosyncratic man’s man with baggage, who plays a long game while intuitively solving each hour’s distinctive homicide.

And what killings they are. There’s the supposed construction worker with his face torn off, the frozen teenager found in a lorry, the stabbed cinemagoer covered with someone else’s blood, the dismembered corpse whose body parts don’t match up and the dead woman adjacent to a horrific car accident who Balthazar deduces wasn’t actually in the vehicle.

Just another day’s work for the City of Lights’ dark contemporary spin on Jack Klugman’s Quincy character from the revered late 1970s American drama.

Will Balthazar find Lise’s killer? Does the immediately obvious chemistry between the medical examiner and the patient but haunted Helene lead to personal complications? Do Fatim and Eddy bond over the corpses they dissect under the watchful eye of their boss?

“I love being in the right,” says the protagonist of Australia’s newest binge, “except when it concerns somebody’s death.”

Balthazar, streaming Monday on Acorn TV.

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The Picks

My 600-lb Life: Megan’s Story
Tuesday, 8.30pm, TLC and Foxtel On Demand

“The only thing that gives me any happiness is the same thing making me this way: eating,” says Megan Davis, who lives with her mother, Donna, in Taylorville, Illinois. As this episode in the new season of the long-running reality series begins, Megan weighs 274kg and just “wants to be a normal person”. The 24-year-old and her perhaps too-supportive mother decide to drive the arduous 13 hours to Houston and work with no-nonsense Iranian-American bariatric surgeon Younan Nowzaradan, known as “Dr Now”, on the dietary regimens and subsequent possible gastric bypass surgery or sleeve gastrectomy necessary to reverse Megan’s doomed course. But even though the diabetic Donna and her at-risk daughter love each other dearly, it emerges their toxic cycle of co-dependent enabling is as looming a danger as Megan’s failing health. This isn’t necessarily pleasant TV, but it is necessary: each year hundreds of such operations are performed on Americans of this size. The value of My 600-lb Life — all 104 episodes and counting since 2012 — is as a guide for those similarly challenged and the loved ones who work to support them.

WandaVision
Friday, streaming on Disney+

“What exactly is your story?” somebody asks the happily married protagonists of this new superhero sitcom, which does for the Marvel Cinematic Universe roughly what The Mandalorian did for the Star Wars franchise. That is, each show takes secondary characters from the main storylines and gives them narrative trajectories that tie in to the whole but are stylistically adventurous as stand-alone properties. In this case, the married couple is Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), the Avenger known as Scarlet Witch, and her one true love, Vision (Paul Bettany), an android killed as a result of Wanda’s actions during the 2018 film Avengers: Infinity War. The concept is that Wanda is so grief-stricken over the loss and her complicity in it that she has manufactured an alternative reality anchored in classic American TV sitcoms — think The Dick Van Dyke Show and Bewitched — that unite them in a domestic bliss that slowly begins to fray. It helps to be a fan of the MCU, though the dazzling visual execution of director Matt Shakman of creator and showrunner Jac Shaeffer’s inspired ideas are engaging for newcomers as well.

Pretend It’s a City
Streaming on Netflix

A decade on from their collaboration in the feature-length documentary Public Speaking, director Martin Scorsese has caught up with his long-time friend, acerbic author, distinctive public speaker and quintessential New Yorker Fran Lebowitz. With veteran cinematographer Ellen Kuras in tow, Lebowitz marches through the metropolis she has called home since 1969 and provides piercing commentary on money, tourists, culture, transport and whatever else strikes her dour fancy. Scorsese also records numerous public appearances and onstage interviews, interspersing these interactions with Lebowitz’s long history of commentary on American chat shows and the like. The seven half-hours, which were filmed in 2019 and recently released with little fanfare on Netflix, come as an unintentional but poignant tribute to an urban lifestyle now in temporary stasis. Take the title, which is the first half of a phrase Lebowitz completes with “where there are other people”. It’s meant as a criticism levelled by the notorious Luddite at tourists with their eyes glued to their mobile phones but is now an epitaph of sorts for a slumbering metropolis that must eventually reawaken.