Back Roads,  ABC, 8pm

As she did with her series on the Nationals, ABC journo Heather Ewart returns to her roots in regional and outback Australia in this fond new series. There’s no great motivator here except to reintroduce the majority of Australians (who, statistically, rarely venture outside our urban centres) to the people and places a lot of people love to eulogise as the ‘‘real’’ Australia but in practice remains a foreign country. Tonight she starts in Ceduna, on the border between South Australia and WA: a real frontier town. The gorgeous cinematography certainly does justice to the desert-meets-coast landscape and while this ain’t hard-hitting by any stretch, Ewart does unearth a genuinely interesting range of characters.

Spice of Life,  Food Network, 8pm

If one of the Kardashians could cook – and was a decent sort of human being – the result might be a little like this. Bal Arneson is an extremely attractive Indian-born American who’s written a number of books about Indian cooking and cooking with spices. In this series we hang out in her home with her two also extremely attractive children while they engage in a range of contrived antics. Today that’s installing a vegie patch in the backyard.  In between, Arneson divides her time between cooking  and sitting on her sofa explaining  what just happened, or what’s about to happen. It makes for a pretty mild sort of entertainment but it’s all good-natured and harmless.

Foreign Correspondent: How to Save the World, 8.30pm, ABC

Did you know that in California’s Bay Area, solar technology employs more people than Apple, Google and Twitter combined? Me neither. And that’s just one of the inspiring insights in this excellent documentary hosted by Eric Campbell and made to coincide with the UN conference on climate change this week. Indeed, it should be compulsory viewing for anyone bleating about how shifting to renewable energy is going to destroy the economy. On the evidence presented here, the reverse is true. Wherever governments and communities have embraced solar, wind and other alternative energy sources the local economy is thriving. And what’s really interesting is that  in some places – for example, California – measures to get things started have been  cost-neutral. 
Melinda Houston

PAY TV

Outback Nation, LifeStyle Home, 9.30pm

It’s hilarious watching Jamie Durie crashing through Florida’s backyard jungles, punctuating his opening monologues with lusty blows of his machete. But he does have to get down to business as quickly as possible – Florida is much like the Australian tropics in terms of aggressive garden overgrowth and the number of didgeridoos burbling away on the soundtrack. And Outback Nation is a surprisingly touching show as Durie helps emotionally struggling families find a new lease on life. Tonight it’s the Sepulveda family, whose big backyard became overgrown while they were caring for their late grandad – a hoarder who also filled the yard with junk. Durie is soon working his magic, advising mum on what to plant to attract birds and butterflies, and building a structure that doubles as an outdoor study for 17-year-old Gigi and a make-believe zombie-sniping fort for eight-year-old Aidan. Nice.
Brad Newsome 

MOVIES

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014) Premiere Movies (pay TV), 6.40pm

There is only one reason to even consider Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s belated, woeful sequel to their stylised 2005 tribute to the hardboiled gumshoe tradition, and that is Eva Green. In a film full of male fantasies – at one point two male characters even argue over whether a woman was a “whore” or an “angel” – the French actress plays Ava, a manipulative femme fatale who binds the minds of men to her plans with a sexual pleasure so heated that the mere promise of it twists their will. Green makes her archetype both larger than life as part of a rich cinematic tradition, and compulsively real in her delusions. With every failure of Daniel Craig’s James Bond to connect with a female character, Green’s performance opposite him as Vesper Lynd in 2006’s Casino Royale looks more remarkable, and while she can easily overwhelm a smaller film, such as Gregg Araki’s recent White Bird in a Blizzard, Green gives purpose and pleasure to oversized parts such as the bloodthirsty assassin/admiral Artemisia in 300: Rise of an Empire. The question is: can she find a definitive role?

Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) Nine, 9.30pm

In Shane Black’s original ending of 1987’s Lethal Weapon, Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs, a borderline suicidal loner barely holding on to his Los Angeles Police Department badge, found redemptive peace by defeating his foes and then dying as his new friend and partner, Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) comforted him. But the chemistry between the two leads, and veteran filmmaker Richard Donner’s pleasure in their destructive purposefulness, was such that  a franchise was obvious. On screen Riggs lived, the original was a hit, and two years later the sequel opened as pointlessness set in. With self-destructiveness replaced by wisecracks, Gibson set the tone for a decade of mismatched partners in run-and-gun films. Spearheaded by Joss Ackland’s haughty Arjen Rudd, the corrupt head of the South African consulate in Los Angeles, the villains are apartheid-era racists, who sneer and terrorise from behind the protection of diplomatic immunity. What had been achieved by characterisation in the first film is now manipulated: to make Riggs righteously angry and ready to kill he is given a romance, with Patsy Kensit’s consul staffer, which ends with her murder; grieving can’t give way to vengeance fast enough. For comic effect Joe Pesci plays a motormouth accountant the two detectives have to protect from assassins, but his shtick is so forced you wish they’d fail.
Craig Mathieson