Television
The Best of the Week
SATURDAY JANUARY 12
Swiped: Hooking Up in the Digital Age (SoHo2, Sky 210, 8.30pm and Wednesday 10.25pm). Yes, please, do explain dating apps to us, because for anyone over
40, they seem like a recipe for disaster. In this HBO documentary, Vanity Fair contributing editor Nancy Jo Sales (who also wrote the article on which the movie The Bling Ring is based) expands on a story she wrote in 2015 about the dating scene for teens and, unsurprisingly, comes up with disturbing stories, from the inherent sexism of the platforms, which are designed by men, to a steep increase in reported sexual assaults in the UK ascribed to men who felt entitled to sex with women contacted through dating apps. Sales told Vanity Fair she was surprised by how many people cried during their interviews for the film. “I think this is because people don’t talk about this stuff, and you’re not supposed to care. Social media can seem like a contest to see who cares less.” Pizzolatto has had some creative input from Deadwood creator David Milch for season three, and Woody Harrelson, Matthew McConaughey and season-one director Cary Fukunaga are executive producers. The production has moved to Arkansas, particularly Fayetteville, which reportedly has a thoroughly 80s vibe. The brilliant Mahershala
Ali ( Moonlight) plays a detective haunted by the disappearance of two boys, and the story takes place in three timelines. To judge by the trailer,
it looks suitably gloomy and menacing; let’s hope it doesn’t fall down the rabbit hole of pretentiousness. Stephen Dorff, Carmen Ejogo and Mamie Gummer also star.
Shortland Street (TVNZ 2, 7.00pm). The 2018 cliffhanger was a veritable killing field: a plane crash and, back at the clinic, two murders. With lives hanging in the balance, where to now for the good residents of Ferndale? Our premier soap returns with an
hour-long season opener.
TUESDAY JANUARY 15
The Great Australian Bake Off (Prime, 7.30pm). Fear not, we are not bereft of Bake Off: season four of the Aussie iteration begins with marble cakes, madeleines and children’s party cakes. The bakers include a psychiatrist, an accountant, a plasterer (handy, surely) and a retiree.
The Passage (TVNZ OnDemand). Anyone who has read Justin Cronin’s trilogy will know that it is a sweeping epic about the decimation of humankind and the little girl who survives it. However, such is its scope (it spans 1000 years) that plans to adapt it into a movie were abandoned and it is now a TV series starring Mark-Paul Gosselaar as a federal agent who tries to protect youngster Amy (Saniyya Sidney). It begins in the present day, and showrunner Liz Heldens, who worked on Friday Night Lights, says the brakes are going on the story “so that you understand the good intentions and bad decisions that led to the end of the world as we know it”.
Valley of the Boom (National
Geographic, Sky 072, 8.30pm). The meteoric rise and fall of Silicon Valley is told in this messy, but entertaining, series. It’s a volatile hybrid of dramatisation, interviews and direct-to-camera commentary and it follows three start-ups that are now consigned to history: Netscape, theglobe.com and video streamer Pixelon. Steve Zahn cranks it up as Michael Fenne, the con artist who launched Pixelon with “iBASH 99”, a $16 million ($24 million) party in Las Vegas that included a reunion of The Who. Bradley Whitford plays Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale, and Oliver Cooper and Dakota Shapiro play Todd Krizelman and Stephan Paternot, the Cornell students who launched social networking service theglobe.com.
WEDNESDAY JANUARY 16
Stephen Fry’s 100 Greatest Gadgets (ThreeLife, 7.30pm).
It’s a little bit old now, so it won’t be featuring the iPhone XR, but it’s still delightful to hear Fry describe the apple peeler as “beautifully simple and yet complex, yet absurd and laughable”, or take a walk down memory lane with such items as the answering machine, the Kodak Instamatic, or “mobile email device” the Blackberry. President Obama had one of those.
Butterfly (TVNZ 1, 8.30pm). How does a screenwriter tackle a story about a transgender child? In 2018, trans rights seemed to become an issue that divided nations – or at least Twitter users. Butterfly, which screened in the UK in