HDTV Heads-Up: October 15-21

While HD-worthy shows like The Amazing Race Australia continue to limp along in SD on TV2, the network has opted to bring us every strand of Donald Trump’s hair in 1080i.

That’s right — TV2 will screen the next season of The Celebrity Apprentice in HD.

But it gets even scarier: among the other eclectically coiffed personalities will be David Cassidy, Meat Loaf, Gary Busey, Dionne Warwick, La Toya Jackson and an ex-Playboy model.

The first two-hour episode (October 11, 8.30pm) will divide them into teams of men and women, and task each with running a Big Apple pizzeria.

As the Boston Globe pondered: “Really, David Cassidy, former teen idol and TV star, has it come to this?

“And Marlee Matlin, Oscar winner, and Dionne Warwick, music legend. This? …

“Is this where Justin Bieber is headed, once, like Cassidy, he can no longer make girls scream?

“As entertaining as the crazy can be, there’s an undercurrent of pathos in Celebrity Apprentice, hidden in the way these people bow to ‘Mr Trump’ and submit to the contrived challenges as if they’re in rehab cleaning toilets.”

However, Indie Pulse reckons it’s the likes of Busey, which it dubbed one of the show’s “five wacky wonders”, and the tensions between the “overly sensitive” Cassidy and the “pushy, rude and smug” Survivor survivor, Richard Hatch, that makes Celebrity Apprentice “such a guilty pleasure”.

The same week TV2 will continue HD instalments of its blockbuster movie franchises, Pirates of the Caribbean (Dead Man’s Chest, 7.30pm October 15) and Harry Potter (The Order of the Phoenix, 7.30pm October 21).

It also will air for the first time in 1080i the 1982 horror classic, Poltergeist (11pm October 16), and will pre-empt the Friday edition of Shortland Street to re-run Kung Fu Panda: Secrets of the Furious Five (7pm October 21).