Tuesday, November 25 - Critic's View

The Age

Thursday November 20, 2008

Jim Schembri

Packed to the Rafters

(season finale)

Channel Seven, 8.30pm

AHH, there's nothing quite as reassuring as the intuition a loving mother has for her evolving offspring. There stands Julie (Rebecca Gibney) on her veranda, enjoying a stolen glance as her mature-age daughter Rachel (Jessica Marais) exchanges pashes with her attractive, aggressively passionate yoga instructor Vishnu (Bernard Curry). The notion that a mother knows her children better than they know themselves is comforting, Julie more or less tells us in her voice-over. If only it wasn't such a damnable myth. As she has painfully deduced several times throughout this outstanding local dramedy, merely knowing what's best for your children is no guarantee they will get it. This Julie discovers as Rachel's new new-age lover turns out to be not quite the disciplined spiritual universe-loving vegan he makes out. Similarly, her private-school-educated son Nathan (Angus McLaren, in the show's best role) tells her how eager he is to leave his real-estate agency, but the reasons for his sudden job search are far graver than Julie can decipher. With its breezy, natural performances and snappy, wit-lined dialogue, Packed to the Rafters has been one of the unalloyed joys of the 2008 television year. The effortless blending of comedy and drama, the shifting points of view from episode to episode and the carefully placed emotional trip-wires the characters keep stumbling into speak of a show that clearly spent more time incubating its concept than most programs. Only in the disappointing final scene of tonight's season closer does the show itself stumble as it hits precisely the kind of false note the rest of the series

has distinguished itself by studiously avoiding.

The Museum

(series premiere)

ABC1, 8pm

IF YOU seriously believe cleaning up dust is simply a matter of wiping a damp cloth over a shelf, you need to check out what a big deal dust is for the dedicated staffers over at the British Museum. To them, dust isn't just a nuisance, it's the enemy, and as the natural history people mount a special display of stuffed animals, the source of a - get this - "dust infiltration" becomes a major issue. Such is the threat to the precious exhibits that two scientists must be brought in to conduct tests,

CSI-style, that will take two weeks. Meanwhile, over in the Ancient Egypt wing, a weedy curator who looks born to the job presides over the delicate moving and restoration of tablets that are as old as he is anxious. Patience is the key virtue for anyone working in the museum, something we witness in the statue restoration lab as a trendy looking young woman applies her expertise in metals by ever so carefully chipping away at the corrosion that has tainted her beloved statue of an ancient Greek guy she affectionately calls "Charlie".

Beautifully produced by the BBC, The Museum is an engaging, straightforward, congenial documentary series that quietly succeeds in enhancing our appreciation of both the value of museums and of the hidden minions who slave away in back rooms, chipping away at ancient corrosion and dealing with the five-alarm threat of dust.

Rush

(season finale)

Channel Ten, 9.30pm

SOME advice, people: if you have a high-value criminal in your witness protection program that you need to keep alive so he can give evidence tomorrow morning in court, please do not trust him to the Keystone clowns in Rush. For all their tough talk, flak jackets and gun pointing, these jokers seem to specialise in letting clumsy assassins get way too close to their man way too much of the time. For an alleged action series with such a kinetic title, the cast of Rush is remarkably inert tonight, spending an inordinate amount of time in this flat final episode lounging around in plush hotel-room chairs and casually driving around in sedans. And all that wobbly camera-work and crash zooming doesn't help matters much, either. Can we at least get one decent foot chase in this show?