Secret Diary of a Call Girl (Monday, 9:30 p.m., Showtime) is based on the blog of a high-priced London prostitute. Billie Piper plays Hannah, a proper girl by day and call girl by night. It sounds like a familiar scenario, but a team of female writers bring a fresh perspective to the material. They get inside Hannah's head and create a credible portrait of a smart, strong woman in a strange situation.
Secret Diary of a Call Girl is billed as a comedy, but it's melancholy rather than madcap. In this week's episode, Hannah has sex with her accountant in exchange for his services, granting his wish to become an S&M slave. Even when the accountant strips down to a leather dog collar, though, the filmmakers avoid cheap laughs in favor of thoughtfully exploring the bond between these two professionals. The episode ends with each sincerely apologizing to the other.
I order you to watch this series, slave.
The Singing Office, Sunday, 8 pm (TLC)
Colleagues from 16 companies take time off work to attend a song-and-dance boot camp, then face off against each other in a vocal competition.
Instead of working, apparently, American employees are wailing "Proud Mary" at the top of their lungs. Now we know why the Gross National Product is heading south.
Celebrity Family Feud, Tuesday, 7 pm (NBC)
Don't get too excited by the word "celebrity." This series features has-beens and wannabes like Mr. T and Kim Kardashian. Their families compete in a quiz format to win $50,000 for charity.
How about donating the money to a charity for third-tier celebrities so that financial need won't drive them to participate in demeaning TV series?
When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions, Tuesday, 9 pm (Science Channel)
As a boy, I thought I had the right stuff to be an astronaut. But this documentary on the U.S. space program makes me wonder. It brings us close to the men and the machines - so close that we can feel the fear that must have come with flying hundreds of miles above earth in glorified tin cans.
The first episodes are set in the 1960s, when the astronauts served as guinea pigs for a space program that didn't exactly know what it was doing. "My wife didn't want me to fly," says John Young. "She thought I'd get killed." It was a distinct possibility, according to members of mission control. We learn about Gene Cernan's ill-fated space walk on Gemini 9, when a fogged-up visor blinded him, and his heart rate shot 20% past the maximum. At this point, I passed out cold on my living-room couch.
Apparently, I don't even have the right stuff to be a TV critic.
On the Road in America, Wednesday, 8 pm (Sundance Channel)
This documentary series follows four charming young Arabs on a trip across the United States. The series originally aired in the Middle East, with the goal of exposing Arab audiences to U.S. culture. This week's episode finds the quartet in Los Angeles, where they see us at our strangest.
They hang out with celebrities being pampered before the Emmys and tour the Universal Studios theme park, where the post-apocalyptic War of the Worlds set catches their eye. "If you go to Beirut and you see real destruction," one of them says, "that would be much more impressive than this."
The most embarrassing moment, from an American perspective, is their audience with starlet Rachel Bilson of The O.C. Bilson is relentlessly inane, especially when she engages the Arabs on a serious topic. "What's it like, just, living with war and everything that's going on - how is it for you guys, I mean?"
The Arabs respond thoughtfully, describing the numbness that comes with constant war. That sends Bilson into a fit of giggles. "But it's great that you guys, you know, are here, though, so that's really cool."
America has spoken: The Middle East situation is really cool.
Shear Genius, Wednesday, 9 pm (Bravo)
A dozen hairstylists come to L.A. to compete for $100,000. It sounds like another high-stakes reality series for talented artists, à la Top Chef and Project Runway. But it's hard to take this one seriously.
For one thing, it looks like an exotic animal crawled onto each contestant's head, then died a horrible death. How can you take them seriously as stylists when their own styles are so absurd? For another thing, snipping just isn't too intriguing as an art form. "It really fails for me on all levels," an Allure editor says of a styling job. But really, how many levels does a haircut have?
In an attempt to generate excitement, the series dreams up bizarre challenges. The stylists have to re-create the hairdos of cartoon characters like Marge Simpson and Wilma Flintstone; they also have to cut hair blindfolded.
It turns out that the blindfolded cuts don't look much different from the eyes-wide-open cuts. Doesn't that tell you something?