TASTY TATIES!
CALIFORNICATION (Mon Nov 19, Ten – 9:30pm) – I’m beginning to come to the conclusion that this show, daring as it is, really doesn’t have anything very new to say – it just throws in gratuitous nudity each week to stop us from realizing. Still, when the person supplying said gratuitous nudity is my old pal David Duchovny, it’s hard to get worked up about – ooh, he’s taking his pants off again!
LOST (Mon Nov 19, Seven – Midnight) – Sorry, this isn’t the eagerly awaited fourth series, just repeats of season 3, so you’ll just have to wait on the edge of your seats for a few more months. Rumours continue to abound that Boone (Ian Somerhalder), the island’s first casualty (who was, of course, outed as gay posthumously in season 2), may be making a return to the Island of the Damned (no, not Barrow Island with its Turtle-killing gas pipeline) next season, and I can only hope so. I love my dead, gay Boone!
BECKHAM (Tues Nov 20, ABC – 9:20pm) – Everything you ever wanted to know about David Beckham but were too afraid of his living waxwork spouse to ask. In-depth documentary about arguably the world’s most famous sports-person, whom all gay guys go through a period of fancying, until he opens his mouth and you realize he’s not doing a Mickey Mouse impression, he always talks like that. Still, it’s worth watching if you turn the sound down…
WALKING WITH DINOSAURS (Tues Nov 20, ABC – 3:30am) – Can’t sleep because you’re afraid that monsters will eat you? Why not tune in to this superb natural history series, which uses CGI so convincingly that JURASSIC PARK director Steven Spielberg used his first f-word when he saw it used to bring a 60-foot long, thirty foot high predatory reptile to shrieking, roaring life!
RAIN SHADOW (Sun Nov 25, ABC – 8:30pm) – New drama from the ABC about secrets and the intrigues which bubble beneath the dry, cracked surface of a small drought-stricken farming community. A bit MCLEOD’S DAUGHTERS-ish, only less soapy and the men aren’t as cute, though star Rachel Ward makes a welcome return to the screen. This looks like it might have some potential, and not frustrated potential like the rain that Ward is always waiting for but never gets (or the male nudity that’s always promised on MCLEOD’S DAUGHTERS but that I never get – but that’s a story for another day).
SHAMELESS (Mon Nov 26, SBS – 10pm) – Rumours abound that the US is considering a remake of this excellent blacker-than-Black-Mamba-venom black comedy about a family called the Gallagher’s that’s even more dysfunctional than the brothers from OASIS. If the US remake goes ahead, be prepared for the Gallagher’s to suddenly become loving and perfect and for fifteen year old closeted gay son Ian Gallagher to be re-written as a 25-year old Mormon fire-fighter with three kids.
SOGGY CHIPS!
THE PRACTICE (Tues Nov 27, Seven – Midnight) – So, you’ve got a hit show about a firm of compassionate lawyers (so much for suspension of disbelief!) that features major stars – like hottie Dylan McDermott (I wouldn’t mind examining his in-chambers); living skeleton Lara-Flynn Boyle and butch grouch Camryn Manheim (read – Rosie O’Donnell asked for too much money) – and it’s rating its socks off. What do you do? Well, if you’re series creator David E. Kelly, you sack the entire cast and replace them with a whole new one, headed by professional evil yuppie James Spader, and then act surprised when the revamped show is axed after one season. Changing an entire cast and expecting viewers to not mind? Have Kelly and X Files maven Chris Carter been comparing notes?
ARE YOU SMARTER THAN A FIFTH GRADER? (Wed Nov 28, Ten – 7:30pm) – Aaargh! Australian TV has finally achieved the impossible with the invention of a game show that is actually more dumbed-down than ARE YOU HOT? This show, in which various ‘celebrities’ match their wits with a bevy of twelve-year olds, is so relentlessly condescending it makes you feel like a fifth grader just by watching – and speaking of wit – someone please deliver a truckload of it to host Rove McManus, who seems to get less funny and more sycophantic with every month he spends at Ten. What the!?
HOT POTATOES!
HEROES (Thurs Nov 29, Seven – 9:30pm) – Series two of this real-life SUPERFRIENDS (which is all so realistic, there’s no body-hugging spandex or lycra, alas) continues tonight with a super-powered serial killer still thinning out the cast, and more people cropping up left, right and centre with incredible powers faster than Stan Lee and his friends at Marvel can churn out X-MEN rip-off lawsuits. Milo Ventimiglia (the gay jock from Wes Craven’s CURSED) continues to be the breakout hunk of the show as the chameleon-like Peter Petrelli, who absorbs the power of any fellow super-person he touches. Someone get Milo to stand next to Exhibitionist Flasher Man, right now!
THE KUMARS AT NUMBER 42 (Fri Nov 30, ABC – 10:30pm) – Yes, I’m as surprised as you that this affable but somewhat one-note chat/comedy show is still going after seven years. Wannabe talk-show host Sanjeev Kumar (Sanjeev Bashkar) attempts to interview various celebrities from his in-house studio despite constant interference from his family; family-focused Mother Madhuri (Indira Joshi), finance-fixated Father Ashwin (Vincent Ebrahim) and sex/fame obsessed Grandmother Sushila ‘Ummi’ (Meera Syal who’s actually only in her thirties). Ummi’s ribald banter (largely ad-libbed by Syal) is, as always, a show highlight and has made her a cult favourite amongst British dykes. (Ummi to Charles Dance, ‘Your fans are known as Charlie’s Angels. Is that because there are only three of them?’) But I still think that Ashwin quietly steals every show with his blunt, money-based questions to guests and long, rambling stories that go nowhere. (Ashwin to Richard E. Grant, ‘You and I share a common home, in that we were both raised in Essex… It takes me three hours to drive from there to work and it costs me a fortune in petrol – is there a quicker way?’) Eerie fact du jour: Sanjeev Bashkar and Meera Syal recently got married, which means that Sanjeev is kind of doing his own fictional Grandmother. He’s like Woody Allen… only funny.
SPUDS IN SPACE!
THE BIONIC WOMAN (Thurs Nov 29, Seven – 8:30pm) – Those of you who made it through the 1970’s with your synapses intact (possibly due to some kind of cybernetic brain implant) may recall THE BIONIC WOMAN, a spinoff of THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN which both made a star out of Lyndsay Wagner and featured people artificially enhanced by silicon technology running around in slow motion two decades before BAYWATCH. This ‘re-imagining’ of the series cranks up the price-tag it takes the US government to overhaul crash-victim Jaime (Michelle Ryan) into a partially-robotic super-being and adds both the credible star power of Miguel Ferrer (CROSSING JORDAN)m as Jaime’s Bionics expert patron, and the dubious star power of former GREY’S ANATOMY medic Isiaah Washington who was fired (eventually) from that show after repeated and unrepentant homophobic slurs towards gay cast-mates. Let’s hope Washington has a bionic zip that closes whenever it detects him mouthing hateful comments.
