TONY SQUIRES – SMH COLUMN

27 May 2013

What a night! While SBS One trots out Wildest Arctic and World’s Most Dangerous Roads, Seven throws in the big guns with Highway Patrol, World’s Wildest Police Videos and Air Crash Investigations.

Nowhere is safe.

After Last Resort (8.30pm) – almost impenetrable for those of us who didn’t take the initial plunge with the crew of the USS Colorado – Seven’s Wednesday line-up is a trio of reality cheapies.

My Kitchen Rules is having a little kip and, like Nine, much of the frontline material is being held for the post Easter push, when everyone has taken a deep breath and recovered from dancing at Ellen DeGeneres.

Still, it’s hard to beat the one-line synopsis for World’s Wildest Police Videos (10pm): “A drug-running exotic dancer leads the police on a merry chase.” Name one television executive who wouldn’t fall for that pitch.

Police are being led on a far less jaunty chase in The Killing (One, 10.30pm), the inspired telling of a murder investigation that refuses to take a conventional television path.

Unlike Last Resort, I wish I’d got in on the ground floor of this sensational series, the US version of the Danish thriller Forbrydelsen. The ground floor, and every subsequent one, seems oppressively creepy as the search for the killer of a teen-aged girl continues.

The Danes really seem to know how to do murky, and it spills into this, with the Seattle of The Killing very different to the Seattle of, say, Frasier.

If you didn’t watch the first series, this is no easy catch-up. But you’ll enjoy a state of entertained confusion.

For those of us who devoured the early series of The Good Wife (Ten, 9.30pm) and then started shamelessly cheating on her with other programs, this show will take you back.

Deep into its fourth series, The Good Wife has perhaps developed beyond its name, with Julianna Margulies’s Alicia and Josh Charles’s Will sharing a sniffle that seems to indicate a renewal of their illicit intimate shenanigans.

I find it difficult to watch Josh Charles without thinking of him as the young Knox Overstreet in Dead Poet’s Society, standing on his desk and bellowing “captain, my captain”.

There are so many terrific people to watch in The Good Wife. Chris Noth as Alicia’s husband Peter Florrick appears to do nothing, but still captivates. You can understand why Sex And The City’s Carrie allowed his Mr Big to sweep her off her feet, dump her, sweep, dump, dump and sweep again.

He is in mid Gubernatorial campaign, without the services of his chief Machiavellian offsider Eli Gold, who finds himself fighting legal battles of his own.

Throw in the always batty Kyle Maclachlan and The Good Wife is worth another fling.

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