TV planner: Doctor Blake; Victoria; The Sinner - best of the week

Doctor Blake wraps up its fifth and final season at the ABC with a nearly two-hour episode featuring two weddings and a funeral — and several murders.

Doctor Blake (Craig McLachlan) and fiancee Jean (Nadine Garner) in their final ABC appearance before moving to Seven

Justin Burke gives his top recommendations for this week’s viewing on the box.

Saturday, November 11 to Friday, November 17

FREE-TO-AIR

TOP PICK

Blake’s ABC swan song

Doctor Blake wraps up its fifth and final season at the ABC with a telemovie titled Family Portrait, before moving to its new home on the Seven Network next year.

In the annals of TV resurrections, saving a local show regularly surpassing 1.6 million viewers is a no-brainer. (Ironically, it would seem to appeal to a similar audience demographic to A Place to Call Home, which Seven abandoned several years ago and Foxtel rescued.)

Craig McLachlan again stars as the titular doctor, alongside Nadine Garner as his fiancee Jean, in a nearly two-hour episode featuring two weddings and a funeral — and several murders.

Set in Ballarat in 1961, it begins with a wedding where the usual tension boils over into ugliness, from which Blake and Jean beat the earliest possible exit.

But the following morning a member of the bridal party is found dead. Blake, no longer the official police surgeon, is prevented from working the case. Instead, he begins investigating a seemingly benign missing persons case in Melbourne, before discovering the cases are interlinked. Further, his own tortured relationship with his father may hold the key to this mystery.

Directed by Ian Barry and written by Paul Jenner, this telemovie finale also stars Joel Tobeck, Anna McGahan and John Wood.

When the series resumes on Seven next year — some reports have suggested that it will feature telemovies scheduled throughout the year, rather than the traditional season of episodic TV — it will be 1963 with Jean and Blake facing an uncertain world, featuring haunted houses, flying saucers, deadly dentists and a long-lost daughter.

The Doctor Blake Mysteries Telemovie: Family Portrait, Sunday 12th, 8.30pm, ABC

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OTHER TOP PICKS

1. DOCUMENTARY: The Nineties, Sunday 12th, 8.30pm, SBS

2. DRAMA: The Good Doctor, Tuesday 14th, 8.45pm, Seven

3. COMEDY DRAMA: Sisters, Wednesday 15th, 8.30pm, Ten

4. DOCUMENTARY: The Mosque Next Door, Wednesday 15th, 8.40pm, SBS

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Jenna Coleman as Queen Victoria

BURKE’S BITES

Saturday

Victoria, November 11th, 7.30pm, ABC

The rather entertaining Victoria, with Jenna Coleman in the title role, continues this week. The queen’s uncle Leopold (portrayed by Alex Jennings who, confusingly, is also the former King Edward VIII in Netflix’s The Crown and Prince Charles in The Queen with Helen Mirren) has proposed Albert as a romantic match for Victoria. Leopold suspects (correctly) that her indifference is related to the chemistry between her and Lord Melbourne (Rufus Sewell).

***

Tuesday

Keeping Australia Safe, November 14th, 8.30pm, ABC

This absolutely fascinating six-part documentary more than matches the hype, as the women and men of the Australian security community are filmed for a 48-hour period conducting their business. This week’s episode focuses on the husband-and-wife policing team of constables Luci Cleghorn and Kam Kamboj, stationed at a remote town called Eucla where they are trying to stop drug syndicates getting their product to Perth. A specialist crew of police officers goes to arrest a man wanted in connection with a robbery, where women and small children are thought to be present. And we meet Detective Senior Constable Matt Lee from the joint anti-child exploitation team who is exposed to incredibly graphic child pornography in the course of his working day. This program keeps explicitly asking “how real are the threats?” and “what are the real costs?”, which distracts from the obvious human conclusion: the fact so many ordinary Australians toil away, doing the best job they can in unglamorous circumstances, to ensure our relative security day in and day out.

***

Wednesday

Europe’s Last Warrior Kings, November 15th, 7.30pm, SBS

If you can’t wait until the fifth season of Vikings debuts in early December, you could do worse than this documentary, which looks at Britain in 1066 — “the most famous date in British history”, as they claim here. King Edward the Confessor dies childless, and three parties covet his throne: William of Normandy, who claims the crown was promised to him; Harald Hardrada, king of Norway (played in the dramatisations here by Game of Thrones’ Clive Russell); and Harold Godwinson, brother-in-law of the late king and power behind his throne.

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Heath Ledger as The Joker in The Dark Knight

FILMS

Tuesday

With Justice League opening in cinemas this week, superhero programming on terrestrial television is thick on the ground. Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel (November 14th, 8.30pm, GO!), starring Henry Cavill as Kal-El, was a successful reboot after the dismayingly bad and now largely forgotten Superman Returns with Brandon Routh in 2006. The stellar cast might have something to do with it: Amy Adams, Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, Russell Crowe and Boardwalk Empire’s Michael Shannon.

Watch the trailer

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Sunday

Also screening this week is The Dark Knight (November 12th, 8.30pm, GO!) starring arguably the greatest caped crusader, Christian Bale. (Ben Affleck is growing on me.) Of course this film, the second in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, is most famous for Heath Ledger’s depiction of the Joker; if nothing else, Jared Leto’s turn in that role in Suicide Squad showed just how incandescent and peerless Ledger was.

Watch the trailer

***

Thursday

From an entirely different genre, check out the Owen Wilson-Vince Vaughan comedy Wedding Crashers (November 16th, 8.30pm, GO!), if for no other reason than to bask in the glorious cameo of Will Ferrell as Chazz Reinhold, the acme of pick-up artists; he can pick up a date at a funeral but still lives with his mum.

Watch the trailer

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Ben Daniels as the defrocked priest Marcus Keane in the season premiere of The Exorcist

PAY TV

TOP PICK

Magnetic exorcist on the road

Veteran English thespian Ben Daniels first came to an international audience’s attention in House of Cards as Claire Underwood’s lover and photographer Adam Galloway. He then played Paul Grayson, the fictional artistic director of a ballet company on a knife’s edge, in the excellent but underappreciated Flesh and Bone, which streams on Stan.

Since then he has starred as Father Marcus Keane in The Exorcist, the highly entertaining anthology horror series, which is also a sequel to the classic 1973 film of the same name.

Daniels is a magnetic screen presence, perfectly suited to this character where he is called to show courage, vulnerability and more than a dash of devil-may-care swagger.

Last season saw him partner with Alfonso Herrera as Father Tomas Ortega to save the family of Angela Rance (who was really the character Regan MacNeil from the film), played by Geena Davis. Suffice to say, across 10 episodes there was time for more than one possession. And the series made the interesting distinction between demonic “possession” and “integration”, where a human soul is destroyed and exorcism may no longer work.

This second season sees Father Ortega and the now defrocked Keane take their anti-demon double act on the road, where they meet Andrew Kim (Star Trek’s John Cho), a former child psychologist who runs a home for five foster children on a secluded island near Seattle.

Kim’s easy demeanour hides his own considerable personal tragedy. And the island has been the site of inexplicable horror in the past. When one of the children under Kim’s care is targeted by a powerful force, Ortega and Keane come to the rescue.

The Exorcist, Wednesday 15th, 8.30pm, Showcase.

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OTHER TOP PICKS

1. SCI-FI: Star Trek: Discovery, Streaming on Netflix, Monday

2. DRAMA: The Girlfriend Experience, Streaming on Stan, Monday

3. FOOD: Great British Bake Off, Tuesday 14th, 7.30pm, Lifestyle Food

4. MYSTERY/DRAMA: Veronica Mars, Streaming on Stan from Friday

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Jim Carrey in a scene from Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond

BURKE’S BITES

Streaming

The Sinner, Streaming on Netflix

Starring Jessica Biel, who also executive produces, and based on the book by Petra Hammesfahr, The Sinner explores the motives behind an apparently motiveless crime. Cora Tannetti (Biel) has a pleasant life, married to Mason (Girls’s Christopher Abbott), with whom she also works. They have a son together. So far, so nice … until Cora stabs a man to death during a family day at the beach. Harry Ambrose (Bill Pullman) is the cop who wants to find out why. “There’s a moment where she starts to question what she knows, and that’s the point where the unreliable narrator becomes very unreliable, even to herself,” Biel told Variety. “She’s now invested in finding the answer, too, because the story she thought was true is just not.”

***

Streaming

Longmire, Streaming on Netflix from Friday 17th

The sixth and final season of Longmire, a contemporary western starring Australian actor Robert Taylor in the title role, begins streaming this week. It was saved after being cancelled by the A&E channel after its third season, so a second chance of another three seasons seems like a reasonably fair shake. Set in Wyoming’s fictional Absaroka county, and based on the Walt Longmire Mysteries by Craig Johnson, last season concluded with Lou Diamond Phillips’s Henry staked to the ground in the desert in mortal peril; the Irish mafia muscling into the local heroin market; the mayor teaming up with Jacob Nighthorse to take the sheriff down; and the prospect of Walt’s property being forfeited in a civil lawsuit and turned into a 36-hole golf course. Hopefully Longmire — the character and the show — gets a fitting finale.

***

Streaming

Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, Streaming on Netflix from Friday 17th

Just as many feel the documentary Hearts of Darkness surpassed its subject, Apocalypse Now, so too may this documentary about the making of Man on the Moon outshine the original. Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond (subtitled Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton) shows Jim Carrey’s method acting antics as he portrayed the singular comedian Andy Kaufman in the 1999 film. Carrey says the studio intended never to release the behind-the-scenes footage because it made him look like “an asshole”. But I’m willing to bet it will be great.

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Kristen Stewart in Personal Shopper

FILMS

Saturday

Gods of Egypt (November 11th, 10pm, More) is a perfect popcorn movie. The story of the contest for power between Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Horus and Gerard Butler as Set feels fresh; the action choreography is thrilling; the humour is wry. Why didn’t more people like it? Could it be the preceding Exodus: Gods and Kings made people feel like they’d seen it? If so, that’s a shame.

Watch the trailer

***

Saturday

The main thing to know about Personal Shopper (November 11th, 8.30pm, Masterpiece) is that it isn’t the pretext for Kristen Stewart to mince around Paris that it sounds like. Written and directed by Olivier Assayas, it is a ghost story, with psychological thriller elements. Stewart stars as Maureen, a personal shopper for a celebrity named Kyra (Nora von Waldstatten). Maureen’s twin brother has died and either she is receiving messages from him or losing her mind.

Watch the trailer

***

Thursday

Another misleading title: A United Kingdom (November 16th, 10.05pm, Masterpiece), that’s nothing to do with Brexit. (It actually has more in common with Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America.) Based on a true story set after World War II, it stars David Oyelowo as Seretse Khama, the heir to the throne of Bechuanaland, who meets and falls in love with Ruth (Rosamund Pike).

Watch the trailer