What's on TV: Wednesday, April 4
movie Fifty Shades Darker (2017)
Premiere Movies (pay TV), 6.25pm
Shaun Micallef is brilliant in Shaun Micallef's Mad As Hell.
Photo: ABCSam Taylor-Johnson did her best to instill a degree of visual suggestion and corporate criticism in her 2015 adaptation of E.L. James' shallow S&M best seller Fifty Shades of Grey, but despite a massive box-office take she was replaced for the sequel by veteran American director James Foley (At Close Range). With James as screenwriter, he made the second instalment of the lightly kinky relationship of university student Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) and billionaire Seattle mogul and whipping enthusiast Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) into a thriller, complete with a stalker and a laughably executed helicopter crash. There's still not a great deal to suggest that this pair, who are trapped in a cycle of attraction, too much kink on his part, and then temporary separation, are even remotely close to being plausible characters, but the worse loss is Anastasia's self-deprecating rationales. No one, not even fictional characters, should take this seriously.
Craig Mathieson
Shaun Micallef's Mad As Hell
ABC, 8.30pm
Of course Shaun Micallef is brilliant, but let's just take a moment to appreciate the cast of talking heads who add their commentary to his scathing news satire. Their names alone deserve some sort of award: Spakfilla Vole, the youth reporter; rabid talkback caller Casper Jonquil; and, my personal favourite, Bain-Marie Spasm, consultant to the senior adviser to the Prime Minister's acting junior adviser. The actors who play them (Francis Greenslade, Roz Hammond, Emily Taheny, Tosh Greenslade and Stephen Hall) seem to be having a ball. Their energy and willingness to wear really awful wigs is crucial to the madness of Mad as Hell. After eight seasons (not to mention Micallef's long history of other news comedies) the jokes are still landing and the commentary is still sharp. To manage this week after week over so many years is an astonishing achievement.
Louise Schwartzkoff
pay Garage Squad
Discovery Turbo, 9.30pm
American drag racer Bruno Massel and his pals ride to the rescue of home mechanics who are in over their heads under the hood. Today they're helping a chap named Terry, who suffered terrible injuries in a truck accident and so hasn't been able to fix up his 1955 Chevy 210. There's sentiment and urgency involved: Terry and his father did the car up together decades ago before it was bashed up in an unrelated accident, and now Terry's father is not long for this world. The end result is spectacular but there are good tips for home enthusiasts too. Massel's team, for instance, makes a point of replacing the old car's rear axle with one from a much newer Ford SUV – it's the same width but it comes with disc brakes for which it will be easier to source new parts in the future. Neat.
Brad Newsome
American Dad
7Mate, 10pm
This episode transplants the series' animated family to the Wild West, with Stan channelling Clint Eastwood as an outlaw on the run and Francine as a hooker with a heart of gold. The nice thing about all this is that it's done with no explanation; the story simply opens with a whistle of wind and a bloody shootout at a ranch and we're away. Creator Seth MacFarlane's fondness for pop-cultural riffs gets a good outing, with sly and not-so-sly references to westerns from Django to Once Upon a Time in the West. The biggest laughs of the episode come from the way it messes with genre conventions. The opening shootout leaves one child alive. As revenge brews in his eyes, the outlaws turn back and shoot him without ceremony, killing the kid, along with a well-worn western plotline, with a single bullet.
Louise Schwartzkoff