Who Do You Think You Are?, SBS, 7.30pm

The finale of series 7 sees Ray Martin discovering his roots in rural NSW and republican Ireland. Ray likes ‘‘ratbags and rebels” so he’s disappointed to discover his paternal great-great-grandfather was a policeman sent to Eureka to put down the uprising (though he arrived too late for the main event). More welcome is the news he has an Aboriginal great-great-grandmother, who bore two children to an Irish gangster. You can only imagine his delight at hearing the fella’s naughtiness had its roots in disaffection at English rule.

800 Words, Seven, 8.40pm

Here are three words I never expected to utter about Seven’s new family dramedy: I like it. I feel a little dirty even writing them, because it would be so easy, and not entirely wrong, to dismiss it as a formulaic, tick-a-box exercise. Take one Logie-winning Rafter (Erik Thomson), add one death-in-the-family back story (Bed of Roses), mix with eccentric small-town setting (SeaChange),  add a dash of sexual tension  and you’ve got the sort of show the promos love to call “heartwarming”. What makes 800 Words greater than the sum of its parts is that it gets the tone spot-on. That owes more than a little to the fact it’s very much a Kiwi show – filmed in New Zealand, written by New Zealanders  and largely acted by New Zealanders. This week, George (Thomson) is dealing with the fall-out of his first column from Weld, in which he called his new home  a “dead-end town”. All hell breaks loose when local tabloid News of the Weld carries a front-page story about the slight. As local estate agent-fireman-reporter Monty, Jonny Brugh is hilarious. But his old man Big Mac (Peter Elliott) is the one to watch. On the sly, if necessary.

Hannibal, Seven,  12.10am

As it nears the end of season 2, this exercise in modern gothic moves to a late slot. Or is it an early slot? That’s the thing with Hannibal: nothing is ever clear. That burning corpse that hurtles down the car-park ramp in a wheelchair – is it really Freddie Lounds (Lara Jean Chorostecki)?  And did Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) really kill her? This show is both fascinated and repulsed by European high culture and gastronomy. It’s as ridiculous as it is stylish, but the not-so-good doctor (Mads Mikkelsen) really does wear some killer suits.
Karl Quinn

PAY TV

White People, MTV, 8.30pm

An interesting documentary in which journalist Jose Antonio Vargas travels around the US asking young white people to talk about their experience of being white. He’s particularly interested in what they think about white privilege and the bizarre but increasingly widespread notion of white disadvantage. That notion, so far as young people are concerned, springs mainly from the misperception that most university scholarships are reserved for minority students (Vargas helpfully points out that white students are actually more likely than non-white students to win a scholarship). Other assumptions get challenged too.  But Vargas doesn’t seek to hector the white people he meets; he’s there mainly to listen and to gently address the odd misconception. He also seeks out young whites who have the unusual experience of being in a minority – a student at a predominantly black college and teachers working in a Native American community – to see what new perspectives they’ve gained. Worthwhile viewing. 
Brad Newsome

MOVIES

Deception (2008), Thriller Movies (pay TV), 6.35pm

Hugh Jackman has made a career out of his X-Men character Wolverine – six movies, plus further franchise cameos, in 15 years – and for the most part he’s played a conservative hand in choosing his other roles. That may stem in part from the dismal response drawn by this boilerplate 2008 erotic thriller, which Jackman produced, co-starred in, and threw his considerable promotional weight behind. The feature debut of Swiss commercials director Marcel Langenegger, Deception actually has a strong opening: corporate auditor Jonathan McQuarry (Ewan McGregor) is an anonymous blip in New York, going from his studio apartment to one unwelcome workplace after another. When a charismatic lawyer, Wyatt Bose (Jackman), actually hangs out with him, sharing a midnight joint in a boardroom, Jonathan latches on to his new friend. With broad but telling strokes the film captures the loneliness of some men, and the platonic attraction of masculinity.

But Jonathan, courtesy of Wyatt’s phone, is soon voyaging through an anonymous pre-Tinder hook-up service called The List, where he’s lucky enough to be schooled by Charlotte Rampling and bedded by various models before he meets “S” (Michelle Williams), a temptress whose sudden disappearance lands Jonathan in a financial conspiracy. The longer Deception goes on, the less it is. The sex scenes are cliches, reminiscent of something Joe Eszterhas might have written in the 1980s, and the dialogue is nowhere near good enough to camouflage the incredulous plotting. Within a year of its tepid release Jackman would be playing Wolverine again.

Days of Thunder (1990), 7Mate, 8.30pm

Very much a NASCAR version of Top Gun – brilliant but unreliable hotshot makes the big league, struggles against convention, acquires a mentor, a comrade, and a girlfriend, suffers a setback, achieves clarity, triumphs against the villain – Days of Thunder reunited director Tony Scott with star Tom Cruise, while Nicole Kidman, who would go on to marry Cruise, made her American debut as the dedicated neurosurgeon, Dr Claire Lewicki, who had to do her best to appear shorter than her leading man. Kidman and Cruise had two conventional screen romances with Days of Thunder and Ron Howard’s Far and Away, and a very unconventional one with Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and it’s only the latter that found something compelling, and of course corrupted, in their chemistry. The movie’s many repetitive races take place on a circular track, and that’s a defining image for an overblown picture penned by the revered Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne.
Craig Mathieson