Best on show for the festive season

THERE are some good finds among the holiday zombie programming, and you can supplement them with great boxed DVD sets.

Kristen Wiig, Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen in quirky comedy Portlandia.

VIEWERS don't watch networks, they watch shows. This is the oft repeated mantra of television executives and it's always true of summer when, if you are a person who cares deeply about intelligent and entertaining TV, you won't be tuning into the commercial free-to-airs.

For the next two months their schedules are both overfamiliar and unrecognisable. Endless repeats jostle with whatever programmers can find to fill empty slots, too often shows of staggering aesthetic aridity.

This is characterised in the industry as "zombie programming"; there is usually little around to give anyone the courage to keep living and what there is would be happily at home on The Walking Dead.

The sport, though, is top class: the tennis on Seven, Nine's revamped Ashes cricket and Ten with the Big Bash, the domestic Twenty20 competition. Ten, mind you, desolate and besieged, will probably overdo the advertising while it still can.

It's easy to imagine not only untold commercial breaks but those irritating running graphics filling the screen at every moment, and sponsors' logos not only on the players' clothing but on their foreheads as well.

There is little new programming to savour - not in factual, food, news and current affairs, lifestyle, history, nature, drama or comedy - on free-to-air. Summer for these tired TV executives is for viewers who turn TV on, largely despise it and easily forget it; not for those who enjoy living with it, rewarding it with their attention - and who remember it. These watchers will turn to the ABC, SBS and, especially, Foxtel, which rather assertively these days uses the summer season to hook and install new viewers.

The ABC has already started its summer season with new episodes of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, which started last week with a fine episode titled A Caribbean Mystery. This week, Greenshaw's Folly finds Julia McKenzie's amateur sleuth investigating suspicious accidents at the shambolic country pile of her dear friend and eccentric botanist Katherine Greenshaw. The lively, unapologetic makeover of Christie for TV coincided with reassessments by literary historians, who a decade ago discovered an unconscious, intuitive feminism subtly subverting patriarchy by depicting women as adventurous and independent. The brutal, if witty, revisions - plots omitted, new characters added, the honeycomb of authorial insinuations replaced by direct storytelling, have provided fine, sophisticated entertainment since 2007.

There's also a host of droll ABC Christmas specials, including the inevitable return of clever Adam Zwar with The Agony of Christmas (December 18, 8.30pm), where he sits down with yet more wise, funny people to address that perennial question: if Christmas is meant to be a time for peace and love, why is it so emotionally exhausting and so often combative? And maybe just as inexorably, a special from the popular Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries, Murder under the Mistletoe (December 22, 7.30pm), in which the glamorous Phryne Fisher investigates a death by electrocution while hanging festive lights.

There's Tractor Monkeys Christmas Special (Christmas night, 8pm) too, with comics Lawrence Mooney, Denise Scott and Ryan Fitzgerald looking back on great Aussie Christmases - the barbies, barneys, tinsel and tinnies.

The big one, though, is the Doctor Who Christmas Special (Boxing Day), fast tracked from Britain and featuring the 12th Doctor - revealed recently to be Peter Capaldi - in his first appearance after succeeding Matt Smith in the role.

After Christmas, the ABC is aggressively releasing two interesting one-offs. Doors Open (December 29, 8.30pm) sees Stephen Fry cast as an art expert who gets mixed up in an underworld heist in a new TV film based on a Rebus novel by Ian Rankin. And Jonathan Creek (Wednesday, January 1, 8.30pm), surprisingly and happily returns with Alan Davies once more in that old duffle coat as the tangled-haired magician sleuth, in The Clue of the Savant's Thumb, the first of three specials after a three-year absence.

Over on ABC2, by far the best of the newer free-to-air digital channels, there's a comedy feast from December 22 to January 1, the station not only reprising favourites such as Spicks and Specks and Would I Lie to You but also broadcasting the premiere of the third series of comedy duo Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen's amiably satirical Portlandia.

Each night too, at 9.20pm, as part of the festive season, the channel premieres an episode of ABC2 Xmas Quickies: seven Australian creative teams - if you haven't heard of them, you soon will - asked to present their own comical take on the season of cheer. Among them, WhiteBLACKatcha introduces us to a black Santa, Girls Uninterrupted provide a handy "how-to" on throwing the perfect community Christmas carols, and Stevo & Mel bring greetings from your favourite Christian evangelists Pastor John and Tammy-Lee.

If that doesn't exhaust you completely and have you reaching for the holiday gin, SBS has two large-scale documentary series for those wanting some cultural and intellectual stimulation during the weeks of torpor that stretch ahead.

From Australian Oscar-winning producer Eva Orner (Taxi to the Dark Side), The Network starts next week (December 17, 8.30pm), the story of Afghanistan's first independent TV network, Tolo TV, and the remarkable Australian Afghan family behind it.

And Once Upon a Time in Punchbowl (January 7, 8.30pm) continues the successful Once Upon a Time format with this four-parter about the Lebanese-Australian community in southwestern Sydney, a proud and resilient group under intense scrutiny and cultural and political pressure.

Foxtel's summer is for the diligent watcher, with a selection of new shows already up and running and some of next year's big imported series starting in January.

British historian Neil Oliver is leading a local contingent on a journey around our maritime borders in Coast Australia; Kerri-Anne Kennerley is hosting those lurid stories of greed, mendacity and murder in Behind Mansion Walls; and we're driving through the vast wilderness of Australia with those righteous court officials in Outback Coroner.

And the Foxtel-commissioned Celebrity Come Dine with Me Australia (Tuesdays from January 7, 8.30pm, LifeStyle) picks up again in the new year. Acerbic James Valentine returns as the unseen narrator and guests include Red Symons, James Morrison, Gretel Killeen, Sam Thaiday and Maria Venuti.

As we near Christmas and the new year, there's a vast array of first-run festive programming with Gordon Ramsay, Nigel Slater, Rick Stein, Nigella Lawson (obviously shot well before her present personal difficulties), George Clarke and Sarah Beeny providing their expert and amusing advice for seasonal survival.

Slater is a favourite, by his own account a cook who writes, author of seven books and food columnist for The Observer for many years. And, like his books, his beautifully photographed TV series offers recipes, notes, and often almost poetic insights. He's an elegant writer, somewhat in the elegiac tradition of Elizabeth David, deceptively unassuming, his prose almost musical. Simplicity is his take on the TV cooking game and in the delightful one-hour special Nigel Slater's 12 Tastes of Christmas (December 20, 8.30pm, Lifestyle Food) he raids his immaculate cupboards, fridge and vegetable patch to show how, with a little imagination, everyday ingredients can produce spectacular results.

I'm waiting for one special above all, Barbara's Old Ring (December 23, 8.30pm, BBC UKTV), a special from The Royle Family, the gloriously dysfunctional TV-loving Manchester family that has been a comedy institution since 1998. The Royles are a particular delight for a TV critic because the show is a precariously straight-faced comedy about people who sit in front of their TV, bizarrely mirroring us watching them. They sing along with the jingles, mimic the catchphrases of their favourite shows and try to stump each other with increasingly banal bits of information. Just like we do. Like the plots of the sitcoms they devour, their own lives are painfully predictable. Just like ours.

This year Barbara (the brilliant Sue Johnston) has gone overboard with the presents, and when a new neighbour with an impressive cleavage moves into the street, will everyone make her welcome on the couch?

Summer is also a time to view those shows that interested us through the year but that we never found time for, and that are still sitting unwatched on our various recording set-ups - a circumstance becoming increasingly rare, especially for those without Foxtel. (During the second series of Portlandia, there's a sketch in which writers and stars Armisen and Brownstein, playing Fred and Carrie - versions of themselves, of course - get addicted to the complete box set of Battlestar Galactica. They mean only to watch one episode, but weeks later they're unemployed - "let's watch one more episode" - and their lives are defined by getting up and changing the disc.)

I've still got Braquo, the French cop series from creator Olivier Marchal that aired on Showcase earlier this year - the title is slang for a brutal heist. It's a kind of Gallic The Shield that follows a group of officers within the SDPJ 92 (Paris district Hauts-de-Seine's police department), where moral lines are crossed.

And I'm recording the final episodes of Treme (Mondays, 10.30pm, Showcase), season four of David Simon and Eric Overmyer's magical piece of long-form storytelling about New Orleans that began a year after Katrina. They're heading to Mardi Gras 2009 in the wake of the historic presidential election, still unravelling Treme's many plots and subplots, slowly and musically, quietly shaping them in the spirit of the past. As it has since its premiere in 2010, this fine series vividly captures the flavour and rich musical heritage of the Crescent City.

Crime writer James Lee Burke calls New Orleans a Petrarchan sonnet, a kind of love poem written by an adoring lover to an unattainable and unapproachable woman of unsurpassed beauty. But he also says it's like falling in love with the great whore of Babylon: "In Louisiana we love the idealism of Don Quixote, but we have always made room for his libertine, hedonistic sidekick, Sancho Panza." And Simon and Overmyer nail it. The first of Treme's final five episodes started two weeks ago and five hours of unalloyed pleasure await the tired critic.

And to top it off, I've picked up two Italian TV crime series distributed by Hi Gloss Entertainment. There's Inspector Soneri: Fog and Crimes, about another battle-weary European cop in the tradition of Wallander, and the complete series of Detective De Luca, from writer Carlo Lucarelli, which is set against the backdrop of Mussolini's Italy, where De Luca is a kind of Italian Philip Marlowe.

SBS appears to be reducing its foreign-language content for some reason, just as many of us have discovered we actually enjoy subtitled "postcard crime", as crime writer Peter Temple calls it.

But Simon Killen of Hi Gloss tells me the retail base for the DVDs is changing and he's selling more through bookshops, a notable change in the market.

"ABC shops and Dymocks have always been critical," he says. "A relationship of trust is developing between niche distributors and the audience that wants to see quality TV but isn't actually getting a lot on the small screen." And as he suggests, TV boxed sets are generally priced right on the mark for quality gift-giving.

As Raymond Chandler's famous private investigator Marlowe said of where he found himself somewhere in The Big Sleep: "It seemed like a nice neighbourhood to have bad habits in." That's how I think of summer: a few good shows pegged out and a pile of discs by the chair.