American Restoration, 7Mate, 8.30pm

Picking apart American Restoration is like shooting fish in a barrel (coming to 7Mate soon). Set in Las Vegas? Check. Scripted tension? Check. Missing teeth? Check. But – you know what? – there are worse things out there. This is for everyone with a shed full of bits and pieces they can’t bring themselves to throw out. It’s for the dreamers (Hi, Dad!) who will one day restore that 1976 Volkswagen Golf in the shed. That’s not to say it’s good. Rick, who runs the workshop, looks like a cross between Alan Rickman and Billy Ray Cyrus, while his new wife, Kelly, seems to have undergone some considerable restoration herself. There are worse ways to spend half an hour.

Wimbledon, Seven, 8.35pm

Oh happy day! Wimbledon is here! But what makes it even more special this year is that, for Australia, it really does mark the changing of the guard. As old stager Lleyton Hewitt prepares to retire after the Australian Open next year, he has been awarded a wildcard so he can farewell SW19. The grass courts have always been kind to Hewitt – he won the title in 2002 – but he’s going to have to start offering substantial donations to the god of tennis, aka Rod Laver, if he wants to get past the first round.

On the other side of the net, stand two of Australian tennis’ great hopes, Thanasi Kokkinakis and Nick Kyrgios. Of these two, I would bet on Kokkinakis. He may not have the flashiness of Kyrgios, who made Australia take notice when he beat Rafael Nadal to reach the quarterfinals last year, but Kokkinakis has been building steadily and he even flew home forone day to visit his sick grandmother recently.

Under the Dome, Ten, 9.30pm

No preview was available for Under the Dome, so excuse me while, much like the show’s writers, I string together some plot-related nonsense. Season two ended with  multiple murders, something about a crater and the dome very much still in place. Season three picks up, apparently, with the dome still over Chester’s Hill and Marg Helgenberger guest starring as a therapist who is there to help the community ‘‘make the most of their situation’’. What’s that? You don’t care? Me too!
Louise Rugendyke

PAY TV

True Detective, Showcase, 3.30pm, 7.30pm

It ain’t quite season one – not yet, any way – but the new instalment of the True Detective anthology is still thoroughly absorbing. Never mind that the details of the central torture-murder feel like they’ve been contrived purely for shock value. And never mind that detective Ani Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams) has an unlikely compulsion to conceal little knives all over her person. Colin Farrell is magnetic as an alcoholic cop with less and less to lose, and Ritchie Coster’s corrupt mayor is an increasingly intriguing character (more so at this stage than Vince Vaughn’s baddie). Get on board.
Brad Newsome

MOVIES

How to Train Your Dragon 2,  (2014) Family Movies (pay TV), 7.30pm

You can certainly make a case for the prosecution that many movie stars view a role in an animated children’s film as a lucrative and quick payday – a seven-figure salary for three days of recording lines with a bit of added pep for that 10 minutes when they film you working for the promotional material. But there are exceptions to the rule, and Cate Blanchett in How To Train Your Dragon 2 is definitely one of them. As the long-absent mother of a Viking boy who shares his world with dragons, Blanchett imparts a level of empathy, thwarted love and twisted belief that is close to remarkable. Doing it with an impeccable Nordic accent is just showing off.

The initial instalment of the children’s animated adventure, adapted liberally from the fine novels by Cressida Cowell, was an unexpected hit, with a message that acceptance of the unknown was better than hatred. The sequel ranges wider as teenager Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) and his Night Fury dragon, Toothless, encounter those who want to enslave the dragons that are part of the Viking community, with Blanchett’s exiled Valka – first seen silently flying alongside her son in an otherworldly mask – the guardian of many of the animals. The wide shots and flying scenes are particularly memorable: evocative and aerodynamic.

Gangs of New York,  (2002) One, 9.30pm

In trying to tell the epic story of how New York was defined by its original mean streets, Martin Scorsese gives us fearsome acts of dominant individuals and their failure to ultimately make a difference against the stratagem of the machine that systematically forms inside urban locales. William ‘‘Bill the Butcher’’ Cutty (Daniel Day-Lewis) is the controller of New York’s mid-19th-century slums, and from the opening scene, when he kills Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), the leader of an immigrant gang, in pitched battle, he fights the tide of newcomers in the name of the native born. Eventually he is joined, for the surreptitious cause of vengeance, by Vallon’s orphaned, grown son, Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio, struggling in his first collaboration with Scorsese), but their power is ultimately insignificant as immigrants come straight off one boat and go to another as they’re enlisted into the Union Army during the American Civil War. New York is to be run by those who can stuff ballot boxes, such as William ‘‘Boss’’ Tweed (Jim Broadbent), who explains to Bill that ‘‘the appearance of the law must be upheld, especially while it is being broken’’. 
Craig Mathieson