What's on TV: Monday, July 9
The Healthy Food Guide
Food Network, 7.30pm
There is ground-breaking food TV (see: anything from Anthony Bourdain, David Chang's Ugly Delicious) and there is the kind of food TV that is the equivalent of a sausage in bread when there's no more sauce. This New Zealand-made production falls firmly into the second category, with host Carly Flynn getting this week's BrandPower award for relentlessly cheerful hosts who make you want to stick a fork in your eye.
Flynn is the bearer of good news (of course) that you can boost your brain with food. Yup. Gut health is important too, for anyone who's been living in an Armageddon bunker for the past five years. She enlists the help of a bunch of science types while a chef whips up some recipes aimed at the kind of home cook with a basic grasp of the culinary arts.
First Dates
Seven, 8.45pm
Without a doubt the Chinese sensation If You Are the One is the best dating show to have ever been created, but if we were to choose a second it could well be the Australian version of First Dates. Just like If You Are the One it's chock-full of awkward moments and a dispiriting strike rate in people scoring a real date, but there's loads of cheaply-made drama to be spun out of the premise of two people meeting up for a blind date in a restaurant while drinking espresso martinis (the First Dates drink of choice) and being filmed.
Asking two strangers to put their best dating foot forward in such an unnatural situation is a lot like asking pandas to mate in captivity, but their loss of spontaneity and basic human dignity is the viewer's gain. This week's gruesome twosomes include a flight attendant desperate to get married and have children because all of her friends are (she's 23), an Italian mama's boy and a nurse whose three previous boyfriends all had the same name.
Black Chicks Talking
NITV, 10pm
In honour of this year's NAIDOC Week, SBS has dusted Leah Purcell's 2001 doco in which five Indigenous women chat about life … and stuff. Actor Deborah Mailman, community warden Rosanna Angus, former Miss Australia turned politician Kathryn Hay, mother of six Cilla Malone and lawyer Tammy Williams meet for dinner around a spinning camera responsible for the most viewer dizzy spells since The Blair Witch Project.
Conversation veers from dream dinner dates and the age-old pads-versus-tampons barbecue stopper to deeply personal revelations about family, Aboriginality and domestic violence. Black Chicks Talking has a winning spirit, although the political impact is bogged down in a cloying "girl power" approach that loses its charm very quickly. LD