This week, while not offering anything ground-breaking, still looks quite impressive. It starts with the Emmys, before moving into not one but three new shows (and only one of them looks bad). There a couple of series returning this week, too, both quality shows (if not as popular as they could be). A decent week, then, nothing that demands attention, but nothing horrendous. Perfect for the start of Freshers.
The starts with the 67th Primetime Emmy Awards, the culmination of the past year of television. Hosted by Andy Samberg (Brooklyn Nine-Nine), the awards, which actually took place late on Sunday night in America, honour all the fantastic shows that were broadcast over the past year, be they dramas or comedies. As usual, the nominations are drowned by HBO, Netflix, and even Amazon, as the old-guard of network TV continues to stutter and die. If you want to watch the awards and the ceremony itself, the highlights will be available on Sky Living, at 9pm on Monday. If you just want to know how won what, head on over to the internet (hint, Game of Thrones).
On to proper television now (rather than the kind of meta-television a televised television award show is). This week looks to be the week of Wednesday – with a bunch of shiny new shows starting. The first of these is American drama Satisfaction, the first season of which aired on USA Network (home of Suits and Mr. Robot) last year. The show follows the story of a man who finds his wife in bed with a male escort, and promptly decides to become an escort himself (which may be the pinnacle of knee-jerk reactions). Despite the ridiculousness of the premise, the show is staunchly committed to being a drama, a decision that could pay off if handled well (and looking at the reviews of the first season, it may well have been). The show airs on the Sony Entertainment Network – which is like Sony’s answer to Netflix, I think. You need a Sony device to access it, anyway. It premieres at 9pm.
If the unfathomable (say it with a lisp, it’s great) Sony Entertainment Network is unavailable to you, Wednesday night is still not lost to you. Over on ITV, a new show is starting, called Midwinter of the Spirit. A miniseries based on the book of the same name by Phil Rickman. The show follows a vicar who also works as an exorcist, and stars Anna Maxwell Martin (Bleak House, Philomena), David Threlfall (Shameless), and Siobhan Finneran (Downton Abbey). It premieres at 9pm.
The final Wednesday offering is a returning show, Showtime’s Nurse Jackie. An American comedy-drama about a nurse (named Jackie) working at a New York hospital, who strays far from what would generally be expected from a nurse, the show stars Edie Falco as the titular character, who won an Emmy for her performance in 2010, and has been nominated several times (along with the show garnering several other nominations). The show has received largely positive reviews from critics. It airs on Sky Atlantic at 10:10pm.
This week’s unavoidable police procedural is a re-hashing of a long standing staple of the genre – NCIS: New Orleans. You’d think they’d have run out of cities by now. Anyway, the very popular, if unadventurous show makes its way to Louisiana, where we can expect to see some people typing furiously on a computer to enhance a picture of carnival, fabricated drama, cookie-cutter police cases, and people running after bad guys with fast paced, drum based music in the background. The show premieres at 9pm on Friday on Channel 5.
Wrapping up the week is the return of critically acclaimed Orphan Black. The show, a science fiction thriller about a woman, one of a number of clones, who assumes the identity of one of her clones after they committed suicide, returns to BBC Three for its third season. Starring Tatiana Maslany (whose performance in the show has been consistently and universally praised by critics), Orphan Black has been renewed for a fourth season, it’s third already having concluded in Canada and the US. As good as it may be, however, you’ll probably want to record, or watch it online, because it airs at 2:10 am on Sunday morning.
