HDTV Heads-Up: No Country for Old Men, The Namesake, New Amsterdam

The free-to-air premiere of the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men will be in HD.

TV3 will screen the winner of four Oscars, including best picture, 8.30pm on May 22.

The next night, at 10.25, the network will air in HD the 2006 release, The Namesake.

And making its post-Nightline debut, at 11.15pm on May 24, will be the short-lived, HD crime fantasy, New Amsterdam, which stars Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as an immortal Big Apple cop. (Lost’s Zuleikha Robinson co-stars.)

It lasted only eight episodes in the 2008/9 US TV season but was praised by New York magazine for its “trick photography, murder, romance, and–much like the Fox Terminator series–more clever ideas and witty jokes, not to mention cool jazz, than the audience expects or deserves”.

However, the Los Angeles Times damned this cop procedural for “a predictable narrative structure that at times resembles nothing so much as a prison”.