STILL STANDING
6.05pm, Saturday, SBS Viceland
One of the great things about this documentary on Australia's video game history is the way it makes you look at things from a different perspective.
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Director Brad Gilbertson was inspired by a single question - whatever happened to all the arcade games he remembered from his youth.
He admits that right at the start, which made think "yeah, what did happen to them?". Because for a long while there were everywhere; video arcades were full of the machines and every milk bar or fish and chip shop had one set up ready to take your money.
But then the home video game consoles came to be and people stopped going out to play video games.
So many of these machines got trashed. But some aficionados tracked them down, learned how to rebuild them (right down to creating the right artwork for each cabinet) and then opened up their own video arcade.
Still Standing triggers a lot of nostalgic feels for those of us old enough to remember the video games, but also offers a good look at how obsession can override commonsense.
THE IRRATIONAL
9pm, Monday, Seven
This series is part of that crime genre that sees some academic or genius team up with law enforcement to solve crime.
Think Numb3rs, The Mentalist, Psych, Castle and maybe all the way back to Murder, She Wrote.
More so than the standard cop drama, this genre relies heavily on the viewer's suspension of disbelief; we have to believe the cops, the FBI or whoever would feel compelled to hire a writer, a psychic or a maths professor to solve crime.
And then the viewer has to accept that there are enough cases to investigate that fit in with the outsider's field of expertise.
The expert in The Irrational is professional behavioural psychologist Alec Mercer; he's able to read people, get inside their heads and figure out what motivates them.
The concept of The Irrational fails on the "suspension of disbelief" front. Largely because the "expert" insight he offers so often feels like something picked up from a Facebook Reel and not a textbook.
As an example, Mercer shows a victim a video of people passing around a basketball and asks her to count the number of passes, which she does and completely misses the person in the gorilla suit that walks across the screen.
I've seen that video a number of times on Facebook so it doesn't feel like any sort of expert opinion at all. And the video in question doesn't really fit in with the plot of the episode at all - it's as though it was put in just to remind us that he's a behavioural psychologist.
BETTER DATE THAN NEVER
8.30pm, Tuesday, ABC
In a world where TV dating shows tend to be horrible pieces of work, designed more to humiliate than find love, shows like Better Date Than Never are a refreshing antidote.
Firstly because they treat the people on the show gently and are unashamedly and openly 100 per cent on their side.
Secondly, it's because they chose people who don't normally get a look-in on dating shows (ie they're not white, hetero blondes). And then they show they're just the same as the rest of us - which, of course they are.