Channel hop
Another Crime & Justice season comes to BBC Entertainment and to kick off the month of nail-biting detective dramas, Inspector George Gently (today, tomorrow and Tuesday, at 9pm) begins investigating his second series of cases in the English northeast of the 1960s.
This season, Gently (Martin Shaw; Judge John Deed) and his upstart underling, John Bacchus (Lee Ingleby; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), have matured into an easier partnership, though Gently does not hesitate to put the younger detective in his place when the latter steps out of line - which is frequently. The two confront systematic child abuse, sexual jealousy and racial intolerance, as the social and political values of the era evolve in the background. While the series features some of the more obvious whodunit plots, the psychological portraits are clever and remain engrossing long after you've figured out who the culprit is. As ever, Gently's stoic exterior belies the sympathy and fairness he extends to victims and suspects who come from different cultures or generations to his.
For sleuthing of a different kind, the second season of Bored to Death (HBO Signature; Tuesdays at 10pm) chronicles the misadventures of Jonathan Ames (Jason Schwartzman; The Darjeeling Limited), struggling writer and unlicensed private eye, who works and drinks in the New York boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan.
The self-described 'noir-otic comedy' is the brainchild of creator Jonathan Ames, an eponym-loving playwright who makes ample reference to his Jewish upbringing in his writing. The series begins without preamble, as the fictional Ames is chased out of an apartment by an angry mark, setting a faster, more streamlined pace for the series. Within the first couple of episodes, the character is zipped up and whipped in a gimp suit, coerced into polyamory by girlfriend Stella and forced to spy on his long-time friend and editor, George (Ted Danson, Cheers; above left with Schwartzman) who has a knack for getting caught with his pants down. Meanwhile, best friend and loafer Ray gets dumped, again.
The series feels like a male ver- sion of SATC or Lipstick Jungle in its 'us against the big city' vibe. Of course, when the boys sit around to whinge about their failed love lives over drinks, the organ at fault usually isn't the heart.
Back in the real world, CNN's World's Untold Stories explores social injustice in Kenya. In Locked Up and Forgotten (CNN; Saturday at 10pm), Nairobi-based correspondent David McKenzie takes us into the twilight world of the country's mentally ill. More than three million Kenyans suffer from psychological illness and they are largely unacknowledged by the government and shunned by their communities. Through interviews with members of NGOs and health groups, and government officials, the documentary paints a harrowing picture of the kind of social stigma that reinforces systematic neglect of the intellectually handicapped and their carers. But nothing is more disturbing than the visits to families most severely affected.
'The humanity of these people is not visible as far as the government is concerned,' Edah Maina, chief executive of the Kenya Society for the Mentally Handicapped, tells CNN. The sobering fact is the Kenyan government spends less than 1 per cent of its health budget on mental health, even though their own figures show 25 per cent of all patients going to hospitals or clinics complain of such problems, according to the programme. The documentary does reserve space for hope, by chronicling the efforts of Maina and other local activists and mental-health carers in raising awareness and tolerance - but it's clear the road to change will be long and hard.
