Television
The Best of the Week
SATURDAY OCTOBER 13
Star Trek (Jones! too, 10.00am). The 87-year-old William Shatner flies in to New Zealand this weekend for raconteur shows in Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington – and the Jones! too programmers have leapt on the chance to give the first season of the original Star Trek yet another run. Episodes air all Saturday and Sunday from 10.00am.
TUESDAY OCTOBER 16
The 2000s (Prime, 8.35pm). This seven-part CNN documentary series on “the oughties” comes from the same production team – Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Mark Herzog – behind The Sixties, The Seventies, The Eighties and The Nineties.
So the format’s familiar, it’s just that things are a little more adjacent. It will get on to the war, terror and War on Terror presently, but its creators chose to make its opening episode about … television. Its thesis that we lived – or, rather, sat comfortably in our living rooms – through the birth of a golden age for the medium is hard to debate, but there might be some arguments at
home about its priorities. The Sopranos is anointed early
on and Curb Your Enthusiasm, Lost and The Office are all examined. But Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica warrant only a fleeting mention and the marquee police procedurals such as CSI are ignored. The fight for the remote control is without end.