Melbourne Cup,  Seven, 10am 

Look, I’m not going to say “it’s the race that stops a nation” because it doesn’t stop me. I just sit there at my desk, plugging away on whatever task has got my attention for the three minutes and 40-odd seconds that have everyone else glued to the nearest screen from some time around 3pm. Of course, you may have spent the day till then chugging champagne while watching the wall-to-wall coverage that starts at 6am, with the Sunrise crew decamped en masse and en frocke to Flemington. You may even have been similarly glued to races one to six (what, there are other races?), and could at a stretch come back for races eight to 10 after the big one. I won’t even say this is the one day of the year every mug turns into a punter for at least a few minutes. Because I REFUSE TO JOIN IN. Office sweep? That’s what that guy with the broom does every evening, right? TAB? Isn’t that some sort of faux-Coke soft drink from the 1970s? Mounting yards? Dude, we went fully metric in 1974. I’ll see you on Wednesday.

Making Families Happy, ABC, 8.30pm

This is like Supernanny for grown-ups, as psychologists John Aiken and Clare Rowe turn their magical spooky counselling powers upon three utterly dysfunctional families in a bid to fix them. And as with Supernanny, though the kids seem the problem at first glance, it’s the adults who most need help. Watching single mum Amanda and daughter Amelia fail to connect is bad; hearing about the time Ashleigh hit her mum  over the head with an iPad, and spent the night in prison for her troubles, is worse; but it’s the communication breakdown between Sky and Steve as they deal with their toddler Max’s bedtime shenanigans that hurts most – if only because so many of us have been there.  It’s easy to judge these families, but perhaps wiser to learn from them.

Reality Trip, SBS2, 8.30pm

Take the Go Back to Where You Came From concept, add five young Kiwis who have never been overseas, spice with extreme poverty, and finish with a work-like-a-local-for-local-pay conceit and you get this strange exercise in fish-out-of-waterdom. There are bleeding hearts, a spoilt princess, and a borderline racist. In its twisted way it’s quite revealing and  at times genuinely moving.
Karl Quinn

PAY TV

From Dusk Till Dawn, FX, 7.30pm

When Robert Rodriguez bought himself a chunk of a new cable-TV channel he was keen to start cranking out some original content. So it was a no-brainer for him to make a series out of   From Dusk Till Dawn, the Tex-Mex vampire movie he made with Quentin Tarantino, George Clooney, Salma Hayek and a big, white snake that was the envy of teenage boys on both sides of the border. In the TV version, Hayek’s character, the erotic dancer and snake-vampire queen Santanico Pandemonium, is played by Eiza Gonzalez, while bank-robber brothers Seth and Richie Gecko are played by D.J. Cotrona and Zane Holtz. As season two begins the Mexican strip club and snake-vamp HQ known as the Titty Twister is closed and everyone kind of scattered. Santanico and Richie are in Texas plotting a heist that isn’t what you think it is, and which doesn’t go as planned. This reasonably watchable episode, directed by Rodriguez and written by his cousin Alvaro (with whom he wrote  Machete), is full of action and packed with pop-culture references covering everything from Burt Lancaster to Dora the Explorer. Danny Trejo joins the cast next week.

Brad Newsome

MOVIES

Reality Bites (1994) Eleven, 9.30pm 

In 1994 Generation X wasn’t really used to seeing a representation of their lives via Hollywood, having grown accustomed to the Baby Boomer stars who’d held sway through the 1980s as they’d been growing up. Set in Houston, Texas – no one had twigged to Austin’s role as a counterculture locale yet – Helen Childress’ screenplay offers four interwoven friends struggling through the years just after graduating from university: Lelaina (Winona Ryder) aspires to be a documentarian but works as a production assistant on a daytime television show, Troy (Ethan Hawke) is a guitarist with a penchant for being fired from casual jobs), Vickie (Janeane Garofalo) works in retail while playing the field, while Sammy (Steve Zahn) is emotionally frozen because he’s gay but hasn’t come out to his conservative parents. There are live bands, career setbacks, and mocking conversations that are actually arguments, and while 20-something angst is somewhat alien to director Ben Stiller, he also co-stars as Michael, a television producer for an MTV-like network who pursues both Lelaina, to Troy’s disdain, and her footage of friends and family. The film’s message was that each generation is different, but taking responsibility and setting yourself for the future are painfully inevitable.

Nixon (1995) Masterpiece Movies (pay TV), 10.40pm 

Oliver Stone, aiming high as always and managing to fall short, wanted Tom Hanks to be the personification of his spiritual and political foe, but when he couldn’t persuade the actor to take the role he turned to Anthony Hopkins, who was able to capture the disgraced US president’s snarling paranoia even if his face lacked the mean-spirited thinness that came to characterise Richard Nixon’s television appearances. Stone never considered size a problem, he was as proud as Nixon himself in believing that he could work to any scale, and this biopic picks across his life with sometimes questionable storytelling methods. The Nixon White House is staffed by a revolving door of character actors, including the wonderful but now departed J.T. Walsh as courtier John Ehrlichman, although gradually they melt away as their plots expose the grasping Nixon to impeachment and resignation. The sharpest performance comes from Joan Allen, whose emotionally abandoned wife, Pat Nixon, offers a more damning indictment of her husband’s flaws than the allusions to dark plotting and conspiracy that otherwise dot the film. The film is long on Nixon’s abuse of power, short on the nature of his character – it’s about the figure Stone despised, not the real man.
Craig Mathieson