TODAY’S TELEVISION

SATURDAY, JUNE 16

MOVIE: Eastern Promises SBS VICELAND, 8.30pm, MA15+ (2007)

David Cronenberg (A History of Violence) explores the global sex trade in this sophisticated thriller. Naomi Watts gives one of her career-best performances as Anna, a London midwife who becomes obsessed with protecting an orphaned baby of a young woman who suffers a gruesome end during the delivery. Anna discovers the dead mother’s diary, and goes on a mission to find any relatives of the newborn. Unwittingly she becomes acquainted with a Russian crime gang desperate to get its hands on the incriminating diary. Grim and unforgivingly violent, it features a fight scene for the ages.

Poldark ABC, 8.15pm

The wind-swept, strikingly attractive British period drama returns for another season of love and war. You’ll be hardpressed to find another show that is as entertaining as it is breathtakingly pretty. After last season’s action-packed finale, there’s much ground to be covered. What will become of Ross (Aidan Turner) and Demelza’s (Eleanor Tomlinson) marriage after she gave in to the charms of the soulful Hugh (Josh Whitehouse, who happens to also be a Burberry model)? Tonight, Demelza’s infidelity leaves her torn between her husband and a lovesick Hugh, who is set to go up against George (Jack Farthing) in the upcoming election.

Counterpart SBS, 10.30pm

You aren’t suffering from double vision. J.K. Simmons (pictured, Whiplash) is mesmerising in this new series playing two versions of his character. In an intriguing tale, Simmons is Howard Silk, a UN employee in Berlin who discovers a crazy secret in his organisation’s basement: a portal to a parallel world. Thirty years ago, Berlin scientists accidentally cloned reality and most people on Earth have no clue they have a doppelganger in another dimension. In tonight’s premiere, Howard’s ordered life working and visiting his comatose wife Emily (Olivia Williams) is turned upside-down. Don’t miss this sophisticated and gripping thriller.