HD Heads-Up: June 10-16

June 1, 2023 0 Comments

➢➢ Thursday nights on TVNZ 1 and Three are being overhauled with the resurrection of a hospital hit and the premiere of the latest Kiwi comedy double-bill. Eleven years after it ended, long-running docuseries RPA returns with a new doctor in the house: Doctor Doctor’s Rodger Corser as the narrator. But that’s not the only change. As well as “digging deeper” into the medical teams and patients, Channel 9 says it embraces a decade’s worth of advancements and new technologies, “from life-saving, minimally invasive brain, heart, and robotic surgery to the 24/7 statewide Clot Retrieval Procedure for stroke sufferers” …

➢➢ TVNZ 1 has scheduled RPA as the 7.30 Thursday lead-in to the latest season of Rich House, Poor House. It opens with an entrepreneurial millionaire and a single mother-of-five swapping homes for a week. But their “amazing chemistry” prompted the Daily Mail to speculate if they would soon be living together under the one roof …

➢➢ Debuting opposite Rich House Poor House is Three’s Double Parked and Homebound 3.0. The former is about a young lesbian couple who both end up pregnant after a botched home insemination job; the latter is billed as “a satirical comedy on life for the boomerang generation”, about an Asian-Kiwi columnist who has to move back home …

➢➢ TVNZ 2 is using stunt programming to launch Kaley Cuoco’s latest vehicle, Based on a True Story (9.30 Wednesday). It hopes to maximise interest in the comedy-thriller spoof of pop culture’s true-crime obsession by preceding it with a one-off special about another obsession: extra-large penises. According to one report, last year’s Channel 4 broadcast of the shocking My Massive C*ck proved a turn-off. “Viewers were speechless within the first few minutes when participants revealed and discussed their manhood. Clips of full-frontal nudity, with many of whom exceeding nine inches when erect, prompted some to switch off” …

➢➢ All eight episodes of Based on a True Story will have dropped on TVNZ+ by the time it premieres on-air. Another series that already can be streamed in its entirety is ThreeNow’s anthology drama Accused, which is to screen 8.30 Tuesdays on Three. Three’s also picking up TVNZ 2’s 2014 sci-fi series Almost Human (11.40 Sunday), which starred Karl Urban and lasted only one season on Fox TV …

➢➢ Redemption (TVNZ 1, 9.30 Sunday) stars Ray Donovan’s Paula Malcolmson as a Liverpool-based detective whose estranged daughter is found dead in Dublin — 20 years after disappearing without a trace. Keith McErlean (Modern Love), Thaddea Graham (Sex Education) and Moe Dunford (Game of Thrones) co-star. The Telegraph thought it “generic, predictable and implausible” but the Evening Standard argued: “While it is by no means revolutionary, it’s a worthwhile contribution to the much loved genre” …

➢➢ The documentary HMP: Evil Behind Bars (TVNZ 1, 8.30 Monday) promises to “uncover secrets of life inside one of the UK’s toughest jails” through interviews with ex-inmates, retired guards and relatives of its most infamous inmates …

➢➢ Duke has scheduled another live bout of King in the Ring (7.30 Saturday), in which eight Super Cruiserweight fighters go head-to-head, while Whakaata Māori is launching Uka (8.00 Friday), in which the best Euchre players from Tainui battle it out for the title of Uka champions…

➢➢ Ending their runs are Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies, The White Lotus, Tougher Than It Looks, Safe Harbour, I Am, CSI: Vegas and Hunted ...