HD Heads-up: October 17 – 23

October 8, 2020 0 Comments

➢➢ The networks are poised to roll out what they hope will be big primetime winners post-election. As expected, the scheduling upheaval will include TVNZ 1 demoting long-in-the-tooth procedural Criminal Minds to 9.30 Mondays from October 19. The network risked going back to the well once too often for the show’s 15th and final season, especially when the competition was as tough as Three’s Patrick Gower documentaries, the telemovie Toke and the return of Westside. Preceding Criminal Minds in its first week in the later slot will be the documentary, Trump: The Reality Show …

➢➢ The same week TVNZ 1 will unveil a slew of new series, from Man Alone (8.30 Tuesdays), in which Matt Chisholm explores male mental health issues, to Five Gold Rings (7.30 Wednesdays), a Phillip Schofield quiz show in which two teams use gold rings on an interactive LED floor to answer a sequence of pictorial questions (“nothing more than a game of electronic hoopla,” was the unimpressed Daily Mail’s verdict). It will be the shiny new lead-in to a new season of Location Location Location …

➢➢ LLL will face off against Three’s premiere of 9-1-1: Lone Star, a Texas-set spin-off from the LA emergency services hit starring Rob Lowe and Liv Tyler (who’s just bailed from returning for season two). “The presence of Lowe and Tyler helps offset the silliness that goes on around them,” Decider said but it got the thumbs-up from both Variety (“its bones are solid, and aspects of its conceit are sweet”) and The Hollywood Reporter (“above average … occasional thrills, lots of deconstructed masculinity”) …

➢➢ TVNZ 2 will launch two local series in the third week of October: Taskmaster and Dog Almighty!. Taskmaster will air 8.30 Wednesdays from October 21 and re-run 10.05 Fridays. (Duke also will air the bizarre-tasks game show 9.30 Thursdays.) TVNZ 2’s also rewarding Jono and Ben with a twice-weekly run for their first series with the broadcaster. Dog Almighty will screen 7.30 Mondays and Tuesdays from October 19 …

➢➢ TVNZ 2 is betting on Dog Almighty! to try to lure viewers from Three’s high-rating Grand Designs NZ and the network’s new 7.30 Tuesday crowdpleaser from October 20, Match Fit, in which Sir Graham Henry & Buck Shelford whip into shape a team of former All Black greats to face their “toughest physical and mental obstacles yet” …

➢➢ Other newcomers that week will include The World’s Most Extraordinary Homes (TVNZ 1, 7.30 Thursday), which will bow opposite Prime’s launch of The Diagnosis Detectives (Michael Moseley and his team of medical experts deduce strange ailments), and Sue Perkins: Along the U.S-Mexico Border (TVNZ 1, 8.45 Thursday), in which The Great British Bake Off star journeys from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico to meet people on both sides of the US-Mexico border. The Guardian thought it more a travelogue than a documentary, “darkness leavened with a dash of wit” …

➢➢ TVNZ 1, Three and Maori TV will offer competing election night coverage on October 17, from 7.00-midnight. Kudos to TVNZ 1 for the ironically apt movie it’s scheduled after its results-and-analysis marathon: Our Brand is Crisis, in which a hotshot political strategist tries to revive a failing presidential campaign in Bolivia …

➢➢ October 17’s Civilisations (Prime, 6.00) looks towards our shores when David Olusoga’s take on the artistic reaction to imperialism in the 19th century shows how one artist in NZ used his skills to record Maori culture …

➢➢ Ending their runs that week will be The Trouble With Maggie Cole, S.A.S Who Dares Wins, Tommy, The Secrets She Keeps and Spiky Gold Hunters …

➢➢ Maori TV will premiere three movies in the week starting October 17: The Olive Tree (8.30 Sunday), Gurrumul (8.30 Monday) and Walking Out (8.30 Friday). Other coming attractions in HD will include: