New TV drama Alcatraz doesn’t have much to lose. After all, nothing could be as bad as The Rock again. Throw a creator of Lost into the mix and we’ve got a time-travel/mystery/crime series starring Sam Neil and Parminder Nagra (ER, Bend it like Beckham) in which 50 inmates and guards from the 1962 prison start turning up in modern-day San Francisco, complete with obligatory back-stories and surreal moments that end with either “But, that’s impossible” or “That would make you 117 years old.”
While Newsday liked its “weird, fun, trippy” vibes, Entertainment Weekly felt it lacked “humour and suspense but could morph into something interesting”. Time, though, questioned the point: “There’s a coldness and no sense that these are characters I want to invest in and spend time getting to know.”
The same can’t be said of Sailor Ripley. No! Not Alien, but David Lynch’s most fun outing, which is revisited in Once Upon A Time: Wild at Heart (DRK, Tue 22:15).
From fairy tales to dairy tails and The Private Life of Cows (DR2, Sun 21:30), which seeks to answer all those burning questions you’ve ever had, like what does Moo mean and why do they keep on shouting it? The Guardian felt it quickly “became apparent that cows don’t really have a private life”. The programme concludes: “So we may be using the cows, but you could equally say they are using us.” The Guardian begged to differ: “I don’t remember seeing any humans getting artificially inseminated or being sent off to the abattoir.”
Elsewhere, one year on from the Japanese tsunami, the horrors are recalled in Fast Track: Japan (BBC World, Sat 19:30) and Children of the Tsunami (DR2, Sun 19:00 & SV2, Sun 22:00); give a wide berth to Extraordinary Women: Audrey Hepburn (DRK, Thu 21:00) because this series is clueless; the engaging Seven Wonders of the Industrial World (DRK, Mon 19:05) charts the constructions of the Panama Canal and the London sewage system; and the 2012 Brit Awards (DR HD, Sat 21:00) includes an extremely miffed Adele getting interrupted five seconds into her acceptance speech, offering proof that nobody takes her generation more seriously than they do.
