FREE TO AIR
Bushfires – Inside the Inferno, SBSOne, 8.30pm
Over the past five years we've broken pretty much every record there is for bushfires. From frequency to severity, all the news is bad on the fire front. And last year was the hottest on record. This fascinating doco (the first of a two-parter) returns to first principles, looking at how fires start and what can be done to combat them. According to the program, firefighters now outnumber soldiers by two to one and the equipment they have at their disposal rivals that of an army. However, it is impossible to go on committing more and more manpower and resources to the annual battle. Now the scientists are getting in on the act to fill in the surprisingly large gaps in our knowledge of fire behaviour, and to work out new, smarter ways to combat the threat. The voice-over commentary veers towards the melodramatic but this is a compelling and chilling account of the bushfire threat.
Black Comedy, ABC, 9.35pm
This is the first in a six-part series billed as comedy "by blackfellas ... for everyone". The cast is a who's who of indigenous acting talent, with this episode even featuring a cameo appearance from Jack Charles (as a small but perfectly formed Moses) and Deborah Mailman. The show is in traditional sketch format and packs a lot in to its 28 minutes. We meet the officers of Blakforce, whose job it is to police what is acceptably black in the community, busting down the door of one unfortunate who is accused of not "acting black" because he bought a Delta Goodrem album his race card is withdrawn. Then there's Black Velvet, a dating agency that matches whites and blacks with the motto "Close the gap with a bit of black". "I've always considered myself a supporter of Aboriginal rights – I just didn't know any Aborigines to support," says one customer. Perhaps the highpoint of the first show is "Starblaks", a parody of Star Trek. The concept of assimilation has never seemed more absurd than when they do battle with the Xenophobians. Some sketches are less successful but that matters little because they turn over so quickly. The writing is at its best when it takes aim at white – and black – pretensions and on several occasions it hits the mark beautifully.
Bates Motel, Seven, 11.30pm
This is the season finale and, if you have been paying attention, you won't be surprised to learn that things don't get any better for young Norman and his dear mama.
PAY TV
Rush, SoHo, 8.30pm
William P. Rush (Tom Ellis) is the coke-snorting doctor to Hollywood's rich and famous. Whether you've broken your penis or simply bashed your girlfriend half to death, he'll be there to sort things out. Well, as long as you've got a big wad of cash to hand over – this is a serious man with a serious lifestyle to maintain. As flawed protagonists go, Rush is pretty flawed. He's not a good guy, and he doesn't really want to change, no matter how much his ER-surgeon friend (Larenz Tate), his assistant (Sarah Habel) or his ex (Odette Annable) might want him to. But series creator Jonathan Levine (The Wackness, Warm Bodies) thinks the way to get us to like him is have him use violence and threats of violence against people who are even more odious than he is. This seems unlikely to work.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
From Dusk to Dawn (1995), SBS Two, 8.30pm
In the wake of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction the dog-eared early scripts of Quentin Tarantino couldn't get pulled out of the filing cabinet quickly enough. From Dusk to Dawn, a B-movie mash-up that was deeply influential for subsequent generations of genre filmmakers, was patched up as a personal project, with Tarantino joining the cast assembled by Robert Rodiguez in the wake of ElMariachi and Desperado. The coolly calm Seth Gecko (George Clooney, escaping E.R.) and his tripwire brother Richie (Tarantino) are bank robbers who kidnap a former reverend (Harvey Keitel) and his family so they can stow away in their campervan and abscond to Mexico. When they arrive at the Titty Twister, a venal venue meant to be their safe house, they find it is a nest for vampires, commanded by a barely dressed Salma Hayek, and crime flick codes give way to undead slaughter. It's slight but authentic, a genuine charge from still-young filmmakers.
Passion (2012), Premiere Movies (pay TV), 6.45pm
For his first feature film in more than five years, Brian De Palma restructured and remade French filmmaker Alain Corneau's 2010 mystery Love Crime, which he perhaps imagined was an examination of the relationships between modern women but steadily descends into hysterical competition that inevitability comes to be defined by Sapphic attraction and sudden violence, as if their sexual urges are self-destructive. In the sleek Berlin office of a multinational advertising conglomerate, Christine (Rachel McAdams) runs the operation with icily styled terror – with her alabaster skin and hair tied into a chignon she's another icy Hitchcock blonde from De Palma's sizable collection. Not as much fun as Mean Girls' Regina George, Christine brazenly appropriates an idea from her deputy, Isabelle (Noomi Rapace), setting off a rivalry defined by noir-inflected lighting and increasingly manic and illicit affairs. There is a rush to a lurid finale and it's as if DePalma has little sense of women outside being additions to a male world.
Craig Mathieson
