HD Heads-Up: TV2 Goes Girls Night With Oestrogen Extravaganza

Kiwi crowdpleaser Go Girls may have gone west long ago but TV2 is still heavily skewing Tuesday nights female with four hours of back-to-back girl power.

Its new-look Tuesday will be anchored by one of the US season’s hottest new HD dramas, How to Get Away With Murder.

It will screen in the 8.30 slot from February 10, ahead of the return of Grey’s Anatomy, Revenge and Scandal.

Fans will be disappointed but few could blame TVNZ for dumping Scandal so late after months of trying to make it a hit, first on TV1, then on TV2.

Ironically, TV2’s next big hope, How to Get Away With Murder, is from the same stable as Scandal and Grey’s, with the show’s creator, Peter Norwalk, a producer and writer of all three.

It stars Oscar-nominee Viola Davis (The Help, Doubt) as a fearless criminal law professor who hires promising students for her practice.

When a beautiful co-ed is murdered, her involvement with the case teaches her students the dark truth about the law.

To hit the ground running with the premiere, TV2 is launching a mobile mystery game that throws the player into a juicy homicide case and challenges them to clear their clients’ names while trying to win $1000.

The gimmicky promotion may not be needed, however, if HTGAWM catches on here as quickly as it did in the US, where critics generally praised it:

• “the most addictive new thriller on TV” (Entertainment Weekly);
• “my grade for Murder: an ‘F,’ for Fan-Freaking-tastic Fun” (TV Guide);
• “the show is fast-paced and unpretentious, and it finds clever ways to deliver exposition that might otherwise be tedious” (New York Magazine).

But the NY Daily News argued: “It doesn’t offer enough fun to balance out the multiple improbabilities in its storyline, the constant time-shifts, the hard-to-follow scenes in the dark or what we’re expected to accept about the legal and academic worlds.”