HD Heads-Up: August 1 – 7

July 23, 2020 0 Comments

➢➢ Three’s newest Aussie reality format, Australian Ninja Warrior, will screen 7.00 Sundays and and 7.30 Mondays from the first week in August. The network will be banking on season four succeeding where Big Brother flopped. It will screen here a week after its Nine Network premiere. In The Australian newspaper, executive producer Margie Bashfield likened the latest batch of “super-charged” contestants to “an AFL player meets a rock climber”. Here’s what to expect …

➢➢ Three also will refresh primetime with the S17 premiere of Grand Designs UK (7.30 Tuesdays from August 4), in which a Gloucestershire couple take on an epic self-build: creating a modern treehouse on a half-acre site in the heart of a small town. (If it sounds familiar, Grand Designs NZ covered a similar build.) While Three trumpets it as an “all new” Grand Designs, NZ lags four seasons behind UK broadcasts of the Kevin McCloud hit (S17 first aired four years ago on ITV) …

➢➢ Having revitalised its Sunday night ratings with Beat the Chasers, TVNZ 1 will revert to British dramas from August 2 with S2 of Liar (already streaming on-demand). It picks up from the first, with the police (led by Katherine Kelly’s detective inspector) investigating the murder of rapist Dr Andrew Earlham. The Guardian thought it “more cliched than captivating” …

➢➢ From August 6, TVNZ 2 will switch from Thursday night movies to series programming with new seasons of SAS: Who Dares Wins (8.00) and Bride and Prejudice (9.00). The former follows five ex-Special Forces Soldiers as they put 30 men through a recreation of the SAS’ physically and mentally demanding selection process; the latter puts five couples and the families who disapprove of their pending nuptials in a secluded country retreat for “extreme” counselling sessions …

➢➢ Prime will premiere a crime drama that originally streamed on Lightbox. Tommy (9.30 Thursdays from August 6) stars Edie Falco as the new chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. Rotten Tomatoes’ critical consensus was: “Though Tommy at times undermines unexpected twists with predictable solutions, it’s still a decent new procedural” …

➢➢ Also new to Prime will be Artefact (7.30 Saturdays from August 1) and Delivering the World (7.30 Tuesdays from August 4). In the former, which first aired on Maori TV, Dame Anne Salmond examines artefacts “at the heart of gripping historical dramas”, starting with Paikea – a carved tokoteko; the latter goes on the road with the world’s busiest delivery company, DHL, and opens with how a Kiwi was able to send a paper-making machine to remote Africa …

➢➢ Ending their runs that week will be All Round to Mrs Brown’s, Dinner Date, Strike Back, Punk, Designated Survivor and Around the World by Train…

➢➢ Coming attractions in HD in the first week of August will include: