What's on TV: Tuesday, August 7
Shark Tank
Ten, 9pm
We surely must have reached end-stage capitalism when the masses watch a TV show about supplicants going cap in hand to a bunch of self-regarding rich people seeking money for their bright entrepreneurial ideas. In its favour, Shark Tank is not a sad approximation of Donald J Trump's The Apprentice, but it works equally as a psychological profile of the privileges of wealth (the made-for-ratings bickering between the panel members; their often casually dismissive interrogation of the hopefuls).
The grown-up game show this week features ideas ranging from an online birthing tutorial business, compostable coffee pods, ecofriendly outdoor equipment and an online university marketplace. It's enough to make you nostalgic for the good, clean entrepreneurial fun of the ABC's The New Inventors.
Who Killed Belinda Peisley
ABC, 9.30pm
It's eerie indeed that a young woman can disappear without a trace and the incident not be reported to the coroner's office for eight years but that was the fate – and the only fate we know — of 19-year-old Belinda Peisley, who was last seen in Katoomba 20 years ago.
This documentary into her cold case disappearance overlays the sober machinations of the coronial court process with a gallery of colourful witnesses from the area's drug culture and the eerie mise-en-scene of the secretive town. Rumours swirled for more than 13 years that the mother of two, who told family members she feared for her life, was thrown off a cliff by men she knew. The truth may not come out but this methodical slow burn, capturing a taste of life among the seedy underbelly of the picturesque Blue Mountains town, is a notable addition to the true crime genre.
The Son
SBS, 11pm
It's almost a return to the dapper Pierce Brosnan of Remington Steele days as he makes his series debut as Eli McCullough, the silver fox elder statesman of a Texan oil dynasty, a man without any discernible heart who looks like he was born in a three-piece suit with fob watch.
Plenty of money has been thrown at this 10-part series (a second has just been commissioned) following our anti-hero across two timelines: as a current-day self-made man confronting a world in which cattle are making way for oil, and a reckless, dentally challenged teenager taken prisoner by a group of Comanches on the frontier.
The violence quotient is kept deliberately high in the series debut that spends a long time laying down the Medici-like workings of the McCullough clan, but anyone hankering for a good ol' western-slash-sweeping family saga will lap up this adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Philipp Meyer novel of the same name. LD