HD Heads-Up: October 5

➢ TVNZ 2 continues to refresh its line-up with the premiere of Imposters (9.40 Wednes-days from October 18). Originally called My So-Called Wife, it stars Inbar Lavi as  a con woman who she starts falling in love with her latest mark (Stephen Bishop) just as three former victims team up to track her down. Entertainment Weekly thought it “fun, light, and sexy” and Variety “surprisingly funny” albeit “shaggy, ridiculous, tonally inconsistent” …

➢ Said The Hollywood Reporter of the series that’s been renewed for a second season: “Imposters isn’t the worst of this current rash of shows about conning linguists, each more clever and morally unrestrained than the last. It’s just that with low stakes, an uncertain tone, a few too many milquetoast leads and generally bland production values, the peak that Bravo’s entry rises to is ‘cute and innocuous,’ which is neither condemnation nor compliment” …

➢ TVNZ 2 will use the October 15 network movie premiere of the like-minded Focus to help promote Imposters. Focus will follow another network premiere, The 5th Wave (7.00 Sunday). Other HD coming attractions for that week include:

• Maleficent (TVNZ 2, 7.00 Saturday)
• Open Season (Three, 7.00 Saturday)
• Fargo (Three, 8.40 Saturday)
• After Earth (TVNZ 2, 9.00 Saturday)
• Out of Time (Three, 10.35 Saturday)
• The 5^th Wave (TVNZ 2, 7.00 Sunday)
• Gone Girl (Three, 8.35 Sunday)
• Focus (TVNZ 2, 9.00 Sunday)
• Evil Dead (TVNZ 2, 11.00 Sunday)
• Lord of War (Three, 11.25 Sunday)
• Tower Heist (Three, 8.30 Thursday)
• Dodgeball (Prime, 8.35 Friday) …

➢ TVNZ 2 will screen season 14 of Grey’s Anatomy within a month of its US telecast. It will premiere 10.05 on October 17 but still can be seen same week-as-the-States on-demand at tvnz.co.nz. “Not only will a character previously presumed dead return, but there are also multiple love triangles further complicating the work environment of Seattle’s favourite doctors,” reports Variety. According to TV Line, “We’d heard over the summer that season 14 of Grey’s Anatomy was going to be ‘funnier… sexier… lighter,’ and if [the]  zippy premiere is any indication, that might have been an understatement” …

➢ Three’s October 19 premieres of Modern Family (7.30) and True Story With Hamish & Andy (8.00) will face off against a new line-up on TVNZ 1: HOMEmade and Rachel Hunter’s Tour of Beauty. They are relocating from Wednesday night to make way for Location Location Location while taking over the network’s 9.30 Tuesday slot is Million Pound Properties, which explores what that kind of money buys across the UK (anything from a London shoebox to a Scottish castle). The Independent lamented the two-part Channel 4 documentary was “nothing dazzling” …

➢ Inside The London Fire Brigade (TVNZ 1, 8.30 Tuesdays from October 17) “provides a unique insight into their work, with firefighters filming themselves on the dangerous front line using special fire cameras”. It opens with the brigade fighting the Grenfell Tower disaster, in which more than 80 people died. “This documentary conveyed the heroism of the fire crews without exploiting their trauma or encroaching on the grief of the bereaved families,” the Daily Mail said. “It trod a careful balance — on the one side it risked being mawkish, on the other ghoulish, but it avoided both” …

➢ Among the one-off specials TVNZ 2’s scheduled for the week starting October 14 are Tricked House Of Horrors (9.30 Monday), in which celebrities try to survive Ben Hanlin’s House of Horrors, the stand-up gig Alan Carr: Yap Yap Yap! (9.05 Tuesday), and the self-explanatory Never Teach Your Wife To Drive (9.30 Thursday), which The Guardian dubbed “tedious reality TV filler that is both sexist and racist” …

➢ Returning the same week is Surveillance Dashcam (TVNZ 2, 9.00 Thursday) while ending their runs are Prime’s Decades in Colour and Mayday …

➢ Prime’s newest nostalgia binge is CNN’s The Nineties (8.30 Wednesdays from Oct-ober 18). The seven-part series covers Bill Clinton’s presidency, terrorism, racism, the Internet, music, the new world order and, in episode one, TV. “CNN delves into a decade of pat neoliberalism and hollow spectacle and, unsurprisingly, comes up with nothing,” sneered Salon. “This is the sort of modern nostalgia that CNN’s The Nineties taps into: a melancholy for the relative stability of a decade that was meant to mark the end of history itself” …

➢ Guesting on October 20’s The Graham Norton Show (Three, 8.00) are Jane Fonda, Nicole Kidman, Colin Farrell, Bryan Cranston, Matt Lucas and Niall Horan …