Mercado on TV: From Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown to Adam Liaw and Daryl Somers

Mare of Easttown

Kate Winslet is magnificent, as she always is, in Mare of Easttown

There is nothing in Mare of Easttown (Monday on FoxShowcase and Binge) that you haven’t seen before. There’s the American small town that’s seen better days, the dysfunctional families, and the rainy winter conditions where women are being murdered. Yep, you’ve seen it all before, you just haven’t seen it with Kate Winslet playing the detective.

Also in the HBO drama are Jean Smart, Evans Peters and Aussie actors Guy Pearce and Angourie Rice. It is a really slow burn, but stick with it, because the twists start coming just after you surrender to it. And Kate Winslet is magnificent, as she always is.

A last-minute program change saw 10 playing the episode of Law & Order: SVU just last Thursday that led into spin-off series Law & Order: Organised Crime which started Monday on Nine. Did this happen because of some contractual obligation or were 10 and Nine just being nice with each other, and the viewers?

Who knows, but nobody was playing nice a few days later when Nine and 10 chopped and changed their schedules. MasterChef (Monday on 10) is starting a day early up against Lego Masters (Monday on Nine) from next week.

Trailing in all this will be Dancing with the Stars: All Stars (Sunday on Seven) which opened strong on Sunday but sank on Monday and Tuesday. That’s because Seven keeps squeezing the life out of its formats, some of which work better just once a week.

It’s already been announced that Holey Moley comes back just once a week next year. Will DWTS return too, and also just weekly? Fingers crossed, because it still brings me joy. Pre-recording and editing it down actually makes it snappier too, so if you think Daryl Somers’ jokes are bad, imagine how much worse are the gags left behind.

Adam Liaw is one of the funniest guys on Twitter and it’s good to see some of that wit on his new show, The Cook-Up with Adam Liaw (Monday to Friday on SBS Food). In the debut episode, he asks his first two guests, Colin Fassnidge and Yumi Stynes, when did cooking get so difficult? The response is, ever since MasterChef launched.

the cook up

Last week I wrote that there had only ever been one Indigenous character in Home and Away (Seven) in all its history and it was in a fantasy sequence. I have since learnt that there have been two real Indigenous guests in Summer Bay, student Kevin Baker (Wesley Patten) in 1993 and Dr Lewis Riggs (Luke Carroll) in 2007. All the people of colour must live in Yabbie Creek.

See also: The best of Mercado on TV

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