Westside Leads TV3 Drama Rally

TV3’s season two premiere of Outrageous Fortune prequel Westside will set up a new-look, drama-heavy schedule on the network.

It will air 8.30 Sundays from June 11, on a double-bill with new British drama, Thirteen, and ahead of the premiere of hospital drama Chicago Med.

The latest in Dick Wolf’s Chicago franchise will air 8.30 Wednesdays, where it will be paired with The Blacklist (which will resume from episode 17 of season three).

The revitalised line-up means TV3 will be screening two hours of primetime drama on three nights of the week, with Saturdays and Mondays reserved for movies, Thursdays for factual and Fridays for light entertainment.

The same week TV3 will farewell two of its best dramas, when it airs the late-night series finals of The Good Wife and House of Cards.

Westside opens in 1981, when the Springbok tour is about to divide the country — and provide a golden opportunity for Ted and the gang to fleece their supporters.

Thirteen is an acclaimed five-part BBC drama about a young woman who’s reunited with her family 13 years after she claims she was abducted as a teenager.

The Mirror hailed it as “chilling, captivating and brilliant …. will leave you wishing Sundays came more than once a week” while The Telegraph said it “has an imagination and an ambition that is refreshing“.

No such praise for Chicago Med, however, which is a spin-off from Chicago Fire, the series TV3 ditched after only one season.

But it should appeal to the same audience that tuned into TV One’s Code Black when it aired in the same slot for most of the year.

The New York Times said it is “so exactly what you expect it to be that there’s practically no point describing it, a bad thing if you like your shows innovative and unpredictable, but a good thing if you can’t get enough trauma room gore and dramatics”.

Said Variety:  “A strong cast is put in service of a fairly mundane drama, one with strong echoes of ER that’s perhaps a hair better than Code Black.”

“Even graded on the Dick Wolf Franchise Curve, Chicago Med is spectacularly underwhelming,” The Hollywood Reporter declared.

“It’s like everybody involved sighed deeply at the prospect of yet another hospital drama and then shuffled slowly to the set, where they were given a script pasted together with lines from hundreds of other hospital dramas and then filmed the whole thing while all involved kept one eye on the clock.”