The Best of the Week
SATURDAY JANUARY 5
Earth’s Natural Wonders
(BBC Earth, Sky 074, 7.30pm). Season two of the series about humans who have adapted to survive in the most extreme of Earth’s environs. The first episode swings from yak herders in the Himalayas and Inuit in the Canadian Arctic to indigenous people in the Brazilian rainforest and cattle ranchers in the blistering Australian outback.
SUNDAY JANUARY 6
NCIS: New Orleans (Prime, 9.30pm). Agent Pride has a big choice to make in the opening episode of season five – whether to live or die, although as Scott Bakula is the star of the show, we’re guessing that his debate with the ghost of a CIA agent who died in season four will turn out okay in the end. To recap, Pride has been shot three times and the team is out looking for his assassin.
His choice to stay (like that’s even a thing) “will have an effect on him moving forward”, says showrunner Christopher Silber.
MONDAY JANUARY 7
The 76th Golden Globe Awards (Vibe, Sky 006, 2.00pm). Hollywood does love a good awards ceremony, and first up in 2019 are the Golden Globes, the ones chosen by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. As an early indication of Oscar glory, the test this year will be how many gongs A Star Is Born collects, and its producers are aiming high by entering the movie in the drama categories, rather than “musical or comedy”.
A Star Is Born has five nominations in all, but Adam McKay’s satire Vice, starring Christian Bale as Dick Cheney, has six. On the TV side, it’s nearly all cable or streaming services, with The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story on top with four nominations. The Americans, The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, Bodyguard, Sharp Objects, Killing Eve and The Handmaid’s Tale are all represented; the exceptions to the pay-TV rule are the actresses nominated for comedy series The Good Place, Will & Grace and Murphy Brown. Vibe has highlights of the ceremony (which is hosted by Sandra Oh and Andy Samberg) at 7.30pm tonight and an encore on Saturday, January 12. Red-carpet coverage is live on E! (Sky 014) from noon.
Underbelly: Chopper (TVNZ 1, 8.30pm). There were what you might call mixed reviews for this latest entry into Australia’s Underbelly files. On the one hand, a gratuitous, phony depiction of a violent blowhard (Australian critic Luke Buckmaster); on the other, “Screentime has pulled it off”, according to crime journalist John Silvester, who co-wrote the books that were the basis for the Underbelly series and knew Mark “Chopper” Read for 20 years. The two-parter, which screens tonight and tomorrow, goes heavy on Read’s duality: Aaron Jeffery plays the Mark Read who is trying to go straight, performing stand-up comedy and writing books and novels, and the violent Chopper, who is drawn back into the underworld by his feud with Alphonse Gangitano (Vince Colosimo). Either way, don’t expect subtlety.
Dr Pimple Popper (TLC, Sky
016, 8.30pm). If you watched, aghast, through parted fingers as Californian dermatologist Sandra Lee took on lumps, cysts and lipomas in her special, then you’re going to love a whole season of “pops”. It begins with boils, keloids and more lipomas and just gets worse from there.
TUESDAY JANUARY 8
Bollywood: The World’s Biggest Film Industry (Sky Arts, Sky 020, 8.30pm). British TV presenter Anita Rani might be from Bradford, but she grew up with Bollywood and in this BBC series, sets out to investigate the massive, colourful, exhausting industry that produces twice as many movies as Hollywood and employs 250,000 people. Naturally, this means participating in one of those colourful dance routines, after learning about the ancient traditions at the heart of the dance numbers. She investigates the secrets behind the fight scenes and the factories where an elaborate outfit can take six months to make and cost as much as $50,000.
The Blacklist (Three, 11.50pm). Another season of the hilarious adventures of Red Reddington who, as we now know, is not even Red Reddington! At last, Liz (Megan Boone) has something on Red (James Spader) and she and her newly discovered sister (Fiona Dourif) are secretly investigating that
mystery while the Taskforce continues to follow Blacklist cases. Who would have thought this nonsense would have lasted six seasons, but there you are.
WEDNESDAY JANUARY 9
Project Blue Book (TVNZ OnDemand). Some of the History Channel’s programming has been off the reservation for a while now, and with Project Blue Book it steps straight into science fiction, although “based on true events”. Project Blue Book was the name of the US Air Force investigation into UFOs between 1952 and 1969 and therefore a terrific source of conspiracy theories after it was shut down because of lack of evidence. Enter Robert Zemeckis, who developed a lifelong interest in UFOs after a conversation with Carl Sagan and who subsequently directed the 1997 film Contact. He’s the executive producer of this 10-part series about Project Blue Book and, specifically, investigations by astronomer J Allen Hynek (Aidan Gillen), a scientific adviser to the Air Force who went on to found the Center for UFO Studies and develop the “Close Encounter” classification system. The series pits Hynek against the military, which is keen to prove UFOs don’t exist, but reportedly, Zemeckis and showrunner Sean Jablonski believe it was a government
cover-up: “Project Blue Book was the original fake news,” Jablonski said at a Mipcom screening.
White Dragon (SoHo2, Sky 210, 8.30pm). John Simm is very good at playing guys thrust into shockingly awful circumstances beyond their control: for example, Trauma, in which he was a dad who blamed a surgeon for his son’s death, or Prey, where he was a cop framed for the deaths of his ex-wife and son. In this series, known as Strangers in the UK, he’s a mild-mannered professor who discovers his wife (Dervla Kirwan) had a secret life in Hong Kong, where she worked half the time. The former British territory is a terrific place for a thriller, and the series features well-known Hong Kong actor Anthony Wong ( Infernal Affairs) as a former cop who helps Simm, as well as Katie Leung, also known as Harry Potter’s Cho Chang.
THURSDAY JANUARY 10
Our Shirley Valentine Summer (TVNZ 1, 8.30pm). Was ITV thinking of Socrates’ famous dictum that an unexamined life is not worth living when it shipped off eight women to Naxos, or did it just get a good deal with Greek tourism? Here’s a kinder, gentler – and older – Love Island, in which an octet of minor celebrities are encouraged to transform their lives. This doesn’t necessarily mean finding a lovely chap called Costas, although it would help.
FRIDAY JANUARY 11
Gardeners’ World (Choice TV, 9.30pm). Straightforward gardening shows are something of a novelty these days, as most garden advice is tucked into makeover shows. Here’s the long-running BBC show (first broadcast in January 1968) hosted by Monty Don. Presumably, some of it applies in the Southern Hemisphere.