Murdoch Mysteries
7Two, 8.30pm
Murdoch Mysteries is pretty much Midsomer Murders in a petticoat. You get a murder per episode, with the mystery solved by a canny detective and his entourage of lovable sidekicks. The setting is Toronto, Canada, at around the turn of the 20th century, but the show is gleefully anachronistic. Detective William Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) is a 19th century tech head who solves his cases using the most advanced technology of his day (fingerprinting) and quite a bit of technology of the future (night-vision goggles). Meanwhile, the good detective's wife, Julia Ogden (Helene Joy), is a blue-stockinged suffragette who, despite her sex, has somehow managed to become a pathologist and psychiatrist. (This is not as far-fetched as it might seem – in 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from medical school in the US.) But realism isn't the point here; Murdoch Mysteries is a romp. However grisly the crime of the week, things always work out all right in the end – except, of course, for the corpse and the crim. LS
Pay
Finding Escobar's Millions
Thursday, Discovery, 8.30pm
It's the most fascinating reality-TV idea in ages: two former CIA agents head to Colombia to see whether they can unearth some of the countless millions of dollars of cash and gold that drug lord Pablo Escobar buried about the place in the 1990s. Under Colombian law, 95 per cent of anything they find must be handed over to the government, but that other 5 per cent could still be a very sizeable amount – and could provide some serious motivation for the locals they promise to share it with. Tonight the CIA men, Douglas Laux and a chap going by the fake name of Ben Smith, head to Medellin to see whether any of Escobar's old minions can lead them to a stash. When their excavation of a field in which Escobar reportedly had people murdered and buried with their motorcycles starts turning up motorcycle parts you'll get chills. BN
Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen star in Bad Neighbours.
The Truth about Fussy Eaters
SBS, 8.35pm
The idea that fussy eating might be a psychological disorder rather than a childish whim will doubtless be greeted with scepticism in many quarters. According to this documentary, that's part of the problem for sufferers of Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder, a recently listed condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The parents interviewed tell stories of doctors who dismissed their concerns about their children's eating habits. "They'll grow out of it," they were told again and again. Jake, one of the documentary's young subjects, didn't grow out of it. He survived into his teens on a diet of chicken nuggets, white bread and chips. Then he went permanently blind from malnutrition. We hear from medical specialists and counsellors working on ways of tackling the issue. It's an interesting examination of the line between problem and pathology. LS
Movie
Bad Neighbours (2014)
Seven, 9.30pm
Bad Neighbours begins with a pair of young parents, Mac and Kelly Radner (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne), who are still adjusting to a home in the suburbs, traditional family roles and the responsibility of a baby, learning that the home next door has been leased by a party-obsessed university fraternity. The couple are both excited by their proximity to youthful excess and worried about disruption, and the relationship soon sours with chief frat boys Teddy (Zac Efron) and Pete (Dave Franco) turning pranks into tit-for-tat sabotage. What's particularly notable about Nicholas Stoller's madcap but sharply observed comedy is how it thankfully portrays Kelly as a woman who embraces the battle, partially because it provides a means of escape from a stay-at-home life that is slowly driving her crazy. It's Kelly, not Mac, who escalates the situation, and Byrne's eruptive comic energy tightens up a broad comedy. CM