There are times when it can be hard to squeeze into the schedule of Lisa Tomasetti (MDP ’12). When SAM contacted her, she was working on two television series in Sydney (she can’t disclose their titles) and preparing a series of eight large-scale images for the 2019 Head On Photo Festival, which displays photographic works in public spaces and galleries across the city. “My life is not normally this crazy,” she says. “But all these TV series and films suddenly just came up. Sometimes it’s really busy and sometimes it’s not. It’s a great problem to have.”

When Donald Trump was elected US President, many pronounced satire dead. The twitter hashtag #nottheonion, a reference to the satirical news website, grew more common with every outlandish tweet and unpredictable decision from America’s new leader. But to paraphrase one of the country’s most revered authors, Mark Twain, rumours of satire’s death proved grossly exaggerated.

American broadcaster Edward Murrow, lamenting the viewing habits of the population in the 1950s, paraphrased Karl Marx: “If television and radio are to be used to entertain all of the people all of the time, then we have come perilously close to discovering the real opiate of the people.” More than half a century later and a cultural world away, Xi Jinping would agree. He and the Chinese Communist Party are on a mission to reduce “toxic” entertainment in the lives of their people, and their wea

On a Wednesday morning in a shopping centre in Sydney’s Chinatown, as businesses on the lower levels are just opening for the day, a crowd is flooding into the third level. The occasion is the official launch of Mr Meng Chongqing Gourmet, the Sydney outlet of the noodle shop chain started by Meng Fei, the host of the Chinese dating show If You Are the One, watched by 36 million Chinese at home, and an enthusiastic audience in Australia.

The focus of the show is not the Departure (as it is called), but the aftermath: what happens to the people who are left? How do they get on with their lives? Do they try to explain it, or do they just move on? It’s a bit like the wonderful French series The Returned, if the actual Returned had never come back.

After years of critical accolades, cult adoration and disagreements with television executives that ended in broken hearts and cancellation, Joss Whedon finally went mainstream and became the billion-dollar man. The budget for the writer-director's last feature film, Marvel's superhero love fest The Avengers, was $220 million. The resulting box-office takings - $1,511,757,910 - put Whedon on Hollywood's A-list. His newest venture is a little more modest: it's an adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing, shot in black and white, in his home, with a cast chosen from his friends and colleagues from his previous television shows, including Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly.

Blackthorn has all the ingredients of a classic western - sprawling vistas, flashes of action, questions of loyalty and a gruff protagonist.

There's nothing else like it: It's a modern-day western whose hero, Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), is a sexy, trigger-happy, cowboy-hat-wearing US marshal. But the series is full of equally enticing figures: Ava, the sassy girl who had a crush on him in high school who he meets again after she shoots her abusive husband; Raylan's father, a sporadically successful scammer; and the guys at the Lexington marshal's office who have a collective sense of humour drier than the Murray-Darling during El Nino.