ENTERTAINMENT
Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind
SoHo, 8:30pm Sunday
Can you believe it’s already four years since he died? Today marks the anniversary and tonight on SoHo there's an unmissable tribute in the form of this two-hour HBO documentary about Robin Williams’ life and career.
Regardless of how old you are, whether you can remember or grew up on and and always assumed Williams’ career began with you’re bound to learn something new here. The early years are arguably the best part of the documentary, with a trove of rare archival and home video footage of off-the-wall stand-up bits and going wildly off script to entertain the studio audiences at tapings.
There are interviews with Williams’ family, friends and contemporaries (and a soundtrack of Steely Dan hits) throughout — Billy Crystal, Eric Idle, Whoopi Goldberg. He came up on the 1970s stand-up circuit alongside David Letterman, who said: “All I could do was hang on to the microphone for dear life and here was a guy who could levitate.”
It’s a funny and warm retrospective — how could it not be? — but it doesn’t gloss over Williams’ frailties. Fellow comedian Lewis Black describes Williams as “the light that never knew how to turn itself off”; other friends talk about his “restless mind". And the ending, although we know what’s coming, is always going to be heartbreaking.
Hard to pick a standout moment but Williams’ acceptance speech at the Critics’ Choice Awards in 2003 perhaps best sums him up. He didn’t win the award, by the way — from three nominees, it was a tie between Jack Nicholson and Daniel Day-Lewis — but Nicholson, stoned out of his mind, invited Williams up to give the speech on his behalf. Watching his supernaturally quick wit take over and cause pure chaos is something magic.
Deep Water
TVNZ On Demand, from Wednesday This Australian crime drama is based on the shocking spate of hate killings of gay men in Sydney in the 80s and 90s — dozens of unsolved cases, which were often written off as suicides. Contemporary four-part miniseries
has a couple of detectives (Yael Stone and Noah Taylor) investigating a brutal murder involving an app called ‘Thrustr’. Lines of inquiry draw them back to those historical cases, in which they believe their killer was also involved, and they are forced to put their careers and reputations on the line to get to the bottom of it.
Next of Kin
UKTV, 9:30pm Monday
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more gut wrenching hour of television this year than the first episode of this new BBC thriller. The six-episode series stars Archie Panjabi as a Pakistan-born, London-raised GP whose seemingly perfect life unravels after her brother is abducted on the way to the airport in Lahore the same day a bomb blast rocks London. The scene where the family learns the news is devastating, but it’s just the start of an intense terrorist drama in which just about everybody is implicated in a tangled web of lies and betrayal.
(The Good Wife)