PICKS OF THE WEEK
Flesh and Bone M-Net, Channel 101, Monday, 21:30
A drama series about a struggling ballet dancer doesn’t sound all that riveting. The writers of this show tried to address the problem by making the world of professional ballet seem bleak, cutthroat and unforgiving. At least that’s what it looks like from the trailer.
Claire Robbins (Sarah Hay) is a young, hopeful dancer who lands a job with the American Ballet Company, presumably by impressing its director Paul Grayson (Ben Daniels). Unfortunately, she also earns the ire of the company’s ageing and injured prima ballerina Kiira (Irina Dvorovenko). It looks like Claire’s career will have some low points involving looking for work at strip clubs and topless bars — the usual starlet-wannabe, dashedhopes clichés.
In the trailer someone gets smacked in the mouth, with blood shooting across the screen, so the tone might become dark from time to time. I can’t figure out how the title relates to the subject matter at this point, though.
Wild Japan BBC Earth, Channel 184, Wednesday, 17:30
I was intensely interested in Japan once, but that interest was limited to their pop culture, I’m embarrassed to say. It’s a common side effect for anyone addicted to anime. But there’s so much more to the place.
Oddly, I don’t recall seeing many shows that focus on Japanese wildlife. Maybe there are plenty and I’ve just never noticed them. At any rate, this show looks at how the creatures of Japan endure the same ravages of nature as its people do, from volcanoes to earthquakes, and the climate extremes. Japan has all kinds of creatures, including bears, deer, foxes, monkeys, eagles, pheasants, woodpeckers, snakes and some pretty strange bugs too.
Shark BBC Earth, Channel 184, Today, 16:00
Yes, it’s another documentary about sharks with a promotional schpiel trying to convince us that it’s different to the others — and it came pretty close to succeeding, for me at least. Among the sharks featured is one that “walks on land”. That claim was a bit worrying. I had to look it up right away, after which I wondered if whoever wrote that line had all the facts. The “walking shark” was pretty easy to find,
Hemiscyllium halmahera, a type of bamboo shark found in the IndoPacific. It certainly does “walk” along the ocean floor, propelling itself along with its fins in a distinctly ambulatory fashion. I have yet to see one doing this out of water, though. Maybe there’s one in this documentary that I can’t find online — or maybe someone was just trying to write an attention-grabbing line. After all, it wasn’t dry land that they said the shark was walking on.
Hoolee Kids’ Pop-Up Channel Hoolee, Channel 197, all week TV networks have been doing this since I was kid, creating special programming blocks to keep children entertained during their end-ofyear school holiday. As a kid I watched the holiday programming eagerly every day and it didn’t do me any harm. Honest. It didn’t.
This pop-up channel will run to the end of January. Highlights include:
Dreamworks Dragons: Race to
the Edge, the third season of the Emmy-winning TV cartoon based
on the How to Train Your Dragon movies;
Zig and Sharko, a French cartoon without dialogue that plays out like a modern Road Runner type of thing. Zig is a hungry hyena who concocts elaborate schemes to capture and eat the mermaid Marina, but is foiled by her bodyguard, a shark called Sharko; and Sonic Boom, the most recent
Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon.