Chance to spend more time with The Missing’s Baptiste
The Missing’s Julien Baptiste is back, now an ex-policeman he is in Amsterdam investigating the disappearance of a teenage girl
When viewers last saw French detective Julien Baptiste (Tcheky Karyo, the great character actor and co-star alongside Mel Gibson in The Patriot), he was finally having brain surgery for the tumour that dogged him throughout the two seasons of hit BBC One series The Missing (2014-2016). Now the calm, wise yet still troubled policeman — check that, ex-policeman — is back on the case, in The Netherlands, investigating the disappearance of a teenager who may be involved with the Romanian mob in the six-part 2019 spin-off series, Baptiste.
When viewers last saw French detective Julien Baptiste (Tcheky Karyo, the great character actor and co-star alongside Mel Gibson in The Patriot), he was finally having brain surgery for the tumour that dogged him throughout the two seasons of hit BBC One series The Missing (2014-2016). Now the calm, wise yet still troubled policeman — check that, ex-policeman — is back on the case, in The Netherlands, investigating the disappearance of a teenager who may be involved with the Romanian mob in the six-part 2019 spin-off series, Baptiste.
The show is every bit as immersive and rewarding as its predecessor, and comes to the ABC after premiering here on the BBC First cable channel a little over a year ago.
Baptiste is in Amsterdam with his wife, Celia (Anastasia Hille), to help with their newborn grandchild. The detective is approached by police chief Martha Horchner (Barbara Sarafian), who happens to be a former lover, with a request: Can Baptiste help Brit Edward Stratton (Tom Hollander, from The Night Manager), who is wandering De Wallen and the town’s notorious red light district in search of his missing niece, the troubled Natalie Rose (Anna Prochniak)?
“I’m not the man I was,” Baptiste says, “people fade, Martha.” Nevertheless, he takes the case — with Celia’s initial encouragement. Yet nobody in this new world is who they seem to be.
After the nearly universal enthusiasm for The Missing, creators and brothers Harry and Jack Williams couldn’t get the detective off their minds. “[That] series was born out of the character of Julien Baptiste,” Harry remembers in the press material. “Baptiste was us going back to what we wanted to write about in the first place, which was this character.”
“We loved working with [Tcheky Karyo] on both series and always wanted to write a show that foregrounds him,” continues Jack. “We’ve been working with Tcheky for so long now that it’s started to shape the character. The character has evolved with the actor. It makes our jobs easier as you write the lines knowing how he’s going to inhabit it and bring it to life.
“We were trying to find a case worthy of Julian Baptiste that was knotty and complicated but still had an emotional centre that made it interesting and compelling nonetheless. We decided to set it in Amsterdam, as we knew the location would perfectly reflect what the series is about, which is the question of what’s behind the curtain, what’s under the surface. How something looks is deceiving. What’s great about the show is the way the case begins is nothing like where we end up.”
Some series are bingeworthy, and others are just compulsively watchable. Baptiste falls firmly into the latter category and represents what to many will be a welcome return to destination TV, a weekly ritual of mystery, crime, human fallibility and what passes for justice in a dangerous world. Thankfully, in this alternate reality, there’s a Julien Baptiste, and a Tcheky Karyo to bring a decent man to vivid life.
Baptiste, Friday, 8.30pm, ABC and iview.
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Bites
Filthy Rich and Homeless, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, 8.30pm, SBS and On Demand
The third season of Filthy Rich & Homeless, the Blackfella Films production for SBS, was filmed before the pandemic and the homeless crisis in Australia — 116,000 people at last census — has spurred the show’s makers to expand the social experiment to include central and western Sydney as well as regional towns. Under the guidance of presenter Indira Naidoo and social researcher/homelessness expert Dr Catherine Robinson, five high-profile Australians will sleep rough for 10 days. They include Melbourne Deputy Lord Mayor Arron Wood, restaurateur Pauline Nguyen, comedian Ciaran Lyons, doctor Andrew Rochford and actor Ellie Gonsalves. “It’s embarrassing how little I know,” Rochford says, and he’s speaking for many Australians. The five are soon educated, with a variety of experiences that vividly illustrate the fearful uncertainty of homelessness and the valiant but often sadly inefficient official response. “Homelessness isn’t a sickness,” says someone enduring that very thing, “it’s a state of being.”
Criminal Minds, Tuesday, 9pm, Seven and 7 Plus
As the 15th and final edition of US police procedural drama Criminal Minds gets under way, FBI Supervisory Special Agent David Rossi (Joe Mantegna) has spent the six months since the climax of the previous series on an off-duty hunt for serial killer Everett Lynch (Michael Mosley), now known as the “Chameleon” due to his talent for disguise. This quest exasperates Rossi’s boss, Emily Prentiss (Paget Brewster), even as Rossi’s team of specialists swings into action investigating a series of murdered young men with the skin stripped from their torsos — which is not the Chameleon’s modus operandi. With references in this episode alone to Andre Malraux and Edward Gein, Criminal Minds has always been a smart show and it’s rather violent for American network television (which is why original series lead Mandy Patinkin quit). In this upcoming second episode, Jane Lynch (Best in Show, Glee) returns to the fold as the mother of team member Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler), even as another is hospitalised following a confrontation with Lynch.
Gold Telethon 2020, Monday, 3pm, Nine and 9 Now
Australians are known for community care and generosity, so it’s not at all surprising to see the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation proceeding with its annual Gold Telethon as the city and country cautiously emerge from the pandemic. And cautious it shall be: abbreviated to a two-hour window, the audience-free broadcast will originate from the open decks of the Coogee Bay Hotel (which has accommodated parents and sick kids visiting the hospital for years) and will observe all NSW government social-distancing guidelines and restrictions. The hosts are Today Extra’s David Campbell and Belinda Russell and they’ll be joined by 11-year-old Ollie, the patient and public face of the hospital’s appeal since 2018. Channel 9 identities will appear, including Karl Stefanovic, Allison Langdon, Alex Cullen and Richard Wilkins, with promised performers at press time, appearing in remote exclusives, to feature Guy Sebastian, Delta Goodrem and The Wiggles. “In tough times, we don’t give up,” says the telethon’s website, and the featured stories of children who have endured and conquered their challenges with the essential, life-changing funds raised — $6.15m last year — testify to their inspiring strength.
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PayTV
Sci-fi drama hits a home run
A woman awakens with a start, prone on her back in the bottom of a rowboat. Sitting up, she drops the mobile phone she’s holding in the water, even as a voice on the other end is asking, “Hello? Are you there?”.
She discovers she’s in the middle of a lake, dense forest crowding the shoreline all around. A man appears, looks at her, then runs away. Paddling to shore, she finds the key to a car on the rocky beach.
Hiking to a nearby road, she’s discovered by a kindly policewoman and confesses to her she remembers nothing. “We’re gonna go see the doctor,” says the officer, “see if we can figure out what’s going on, OK?”
What’s going on is that US military veteran Jacqueline Calico (Janelle Monae) has just met perhaps the last completely sympathetic and honestly helpful person she’ll encounter throughout her coming ordeal.
Nearly 15 minutes into the first of seven half-hour episodes in the much-anticipated second season of the harrowing and binge-worthy science-fiction drama Homecoming, as Jackie is driven away by deceptively affable new acquaintance Buddy (John Billingsley), comes the kicker: “Get Over It.”
The words are on a billboard, featuring a kindly farmer smiling in a field full of berry plants that will be familiar to viewers who watched the first season and a hint for newcomers, “From the farm of Leonard Geist”. That’s Geist (immediately recognisable character actor Chris Cooper) as in Geist Emergent Group, the parent company for whom social worker Heidi Bergman (Julia Roberts) had worked in the show’s first season.
Heidi’s not here anymore, but one of her patients is. Walter Cruz (Stephan James) was among the returning US soldiers enrolled in Geist’s Homecoming Transitional Support Centre, an experimental and increasingly sinister live-in facility tasked with easing the men’s transition to civilian life.
Jackie’s link to the facility soon becomes apparent, as she meets returning Geist staff members Craig (Alex Karpovsky) and Audrey Temple (Hong Chau), the latter of whom has risen rapidly through the ranks.
Heidi’s supervisor, Colin Belfast (Bobby Cannavale), also returns, and new to the story are not only Geist himself, but Francine Bunda (Joan Cusack), a US Department of Defence representative manoeuvring to partner with the company in pursuit of the mysterious plant (those who appreciated what the stirring drama Bloom was going for will feel right at home in this world). As Jackie finds out who she is and what she’s done, the chain of poor decisions made by nearly everyone comes to a tragic head.
All this vague exposition makes it sound like this new series will make no sense without having seen the first. Nothing could be further from the truth, as this is a self-contained story that may be seen and appreciated before or after the first season.
Homecoming is billed as an anthology, and like all good anthologies the new season continues the theme of what started life as a podcast and offers an expanded take on the basic concept.
Be reassured that podcast and show creators Micah Bloomberg and Eli Horowitz are still at the helm and know exactly what they’re doing, with new series director Kyle Patrick Alvarez (director of award-winning 2015 thriller The Stanford Prison Experiment, which makes sense) preserving and amplifying the sense of skewed normalcy begun by original director Sam Esmail (Mr Robot), who returns as an executive producer.
“It’s complicated,” Audrey says, as the astonishing seventh episode is under way, and, later, “this is what we wanted”.
In this moment, the second series of Homecoming reveals itself as the greatest long-form episode of The Twilight Zone Rod Serling never got around to writing.
Homecoming, streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
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Bites
Hannah Gadsby: Douglas, Streaming on Netflix
Hannah Gadsby is back, squarely in her special zone and again doing it on her terms. Yet those who know her only from the groundbreaking and game-changing 2018 stand-up special, Nanette, should understand those terms have changed. Nobody is more aware than Gadsby of how the previous show changed not only stand-up comedy, but her very life. She opens giving the full-to-the-gilded-rafters LA audience a preview of what they’re about to see. It is, she says, a strategy to manage their expectations, as the comedian is fresh out of the trauma that gave Nanette its force as a visceral unveiling of her life until 2018. Douglas, named after her older dog, is about her present, and harnesses her comic prowess in a tightly scripted journey. She reveals her recent autism diagnosis was like “being handed the keys to me”, and focuses her searing wit on Americans, anti-vaxxers, the paleo folk and more. This is a stimulating and revelatory hour of honest comedy from a brave and gifted entertainer.
Disney Gallery: Star Wars: The Mandalorian, Fridays, streaming on Disney+
Whether you’ve still got a Baby Yoda doll in your bedroom or just like to know how CG-heavy TV shows and movies are made without sacrificing organic storytelling, there’s something in the new, behind-the-scenes documentary/talk show Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian for fans and newcomers alike. The first of eight episodes highlights the directors: Dave Filoni (“I can outclass any nerd there, because I’ve been in a room with George Lucas”), Deborah Chow (“I really like killing storm troopers”), Rick Famuyiwa (“I love making stories about these misfits”), Bryce Dallas Howard (“if the magic act doesn’t work, then everything fails), Taika Waititi (“over the years, I’ve picked up jargon, I could trick the computer people …”) and Mandalorian creator Jon Favreau (“I like hiring smart people”). From there the show has looked at the Star Wars legacy, talked with Mandalorian cast, explored new technology on the show, and revealed the practical on-set effects. The upcoming half-hour looks at the visualisation of the Star Wars world, with the final weekly editions covering the score and franchise interconnectivity. The Mandalorian’s season two is set for October.
The Real Story with Maria Elena Salinas: The Deltona Massacre, Wednesday, 8.30pm, Investigation Discovery
When people talk of the evils of videogaming, they’re probably not referring to the 2004 killing of six people in residential community near Orlando of Deltona, Florida, that became known as the “Xbox Murders”. New Hampshire woman Erin Belanger had relocated to Florida to keep an eye on her grandparents’ winter home but called in the police when she discovered squatters living on the property. One of them, a hulking convicted felon then on parole named Troy Victorino, became angry when Belanger confiscated his property, including the device. Enlisting three men to help him, Victorino and his crew beat four men, two women (including Belanger) and a dog to death with baseball bats. Mixing police and news videos, emergency calls and dramatisations, US journalist Maria Elena Salinas, known as “the voice of Hispanic America”, begins her 2017 10-part true crime series by interviewing officials and a witness meant to participate in the murders but who backed out. “I will probably never forget what I saw,” said then state prosecutor John Tanner, who had previously coaxed a confession from Ted Bundy, “and I don’t want to remember it.”
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