The Bachelor Australia, Ten, 7.30pm

This much we know. The second series of The Bachelor Australia will feature an Australian bachelor. He will be presumably single, unless proven otherwise by the type of magazines that like to test these assumptions. It will have 24 young women, all presumably single unless proven otherwise (see above). Those viewers staying true to the ''Bachelor journey'' - I use the term advisedly, as there is always some form of tropical island getaway enabling the shedding of many clothes - will be treated to a primetime fairytale of fantasy dates and floristry, gleaming dental work, and enough space between the inanities to ponder the subtle linguistic differences between ''I love you'' and ''I'm falling in love with you.''

Borgen, SBS One, 9.30pm

No one would have blamed Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen) for swapping the Moderate party room for the glittering Bill Clinton-esque world of corporate speaking engagements after being drubbed as Danish PM at the end of Borgen's last season. Its return, set two years down the track, finds her enjoying the trappings of post-political success and a handsome new lover in her Hong Kong hotel room. Anyone who suffered with her through seasons one and two will know this fool's gold is unlikely to impress the steely operative for long - and anyway, the opening quote from Dante's Divine Comedy (''Midway through the journey of our life …'' - you know the rest) gives the game away at the get-go. It's back to the gloomy, grey skies of Copenhagen, where her beloved party, now led by the sharkish Jacob Kruse (Jens Jacob Tychsen), is colluding in the oppression of immigrants. Will she return to politics? Is Hamlet a Dane? And will Katrine Fonsmark (Birgitte Hjort Sorensen) become collateral damage in the fight for the Moderate future?

Community, 8pm, SBS2

A comedy made explicitly for the ADD generation who flit between hyperlinks and can concentrate on nothing for any longer than 5.9 seconds, Community leans heavily on its target audience's intricate knowledge of the byways of popular culture. With Chevy Chase in the role reserved for the washed-up, middle-aged male star and a cast of semi-famous actors able to belt out their lines like a meth binge collective, it's a welcome back for season three kicking off with a rather fine song-and-dance Glee parody.

LARISSA DUBECKI

PAY TV

The Recruit, Fox8, 7.30pm

Having survived their first round of challenges, including shark-diving and running with cement building blocks through the Melbourne CBD, the young weekend footballers vying for a draft to the AFL must face yet another gruelling, nerve-racking feat to prove their courage, a quality their coaches – Michael Voss, Darren Burgess and Ben Dixon – constantly reinforce is crucial to the professional game. It is apparently only by free-falling from the roof of the Etihad Stadium that the contestants are truly able to demonstrate the total  disregard for personal safety required. In what must have been a godsend to the editing suite, a vertigo sufferer delivers some uncomfortably dramatic moments after seemingly endless footage of men boldly leaping into mid-air. The Recruits are later bussed to Dhurringile Prison in regional Victoria to play a team of inmates. Cue a textbook reality twist.

Broad City, The Comedy Channel, 8.30pm

If Lena Dunham’s Hannah Horvath from Girls was a complete stoner, she might resemble Abbi Jackson in this real girls’ misadventure series. Abbi and her BFF Ilana (Ilana Glazer) are 20-somethings stumbling through student life like Bridget Jones on pot. Using homegirl vernacular with white-girl overtones, they make a warmly funny duo.

BRIDGET MCMANUS

MOVIES

How I Ended This Summer (2010), SBS One, 11.05pm

Many of the gaps – in age, outlook and cultural belief – which have come to the fore in modern-day Russia are brought into stark, intimate focus in writer-director Alexei Popogrebsky’s increasingly uneasy and isolated drama. In the depths of the Russian Arctic, at a remote meteorological facility, the middle-aged Sergei (Sergei Puskepalis) has trouble connecting with – or perhaps simply dominating – his young assistant for the season, Pavel (Grigoriy Dobrygin). The latter cuts himself off behind headphones and media but on  a day when Sergei is away from the radio transmitter, he takes a message that delivers bad news for his colleague but is too intimidated to tell him. Holding onto the secret gradually poisons the already fractured relationship between the two, a feeling heightened by a dangerous environment where radiation and polar bears both lurk as threats. Some of Popogrebsky’s landscapes strive for visual effect but the slow implosion of the duo’s dynamic is capably conveyed, returning them to the wild.

Old School (2003), Comedy Movies (pay TV), 10.10pm

The trend of comedies about grown men who want to flee the responsibilities of adult life and return to the imagined nirvana of their youth actually began with this movie from Todd Phillips, who would go on to do The Hangover. Having left his wife (Juliette Lewis) after discovering  she was flagrantly cheating on him, 30-something Mitch (Luke Wilson) rents a home near a college campus, which his best friends Beanie (Vince Vaughan at his motor-mouth best) and reformed party animal Frank (Will Ferrell) turn into a riotous fraternity house, complete with a motley crew of hopeful inductees. Nodding affectionately to Animal House, with Entourage’s Jeremy Piven as the villainous college dean trying to shut down the fun, the movie is a collection of episodic indulgences, brightened by one of Ferrell’s most bluntly effective performances as an American buffoon; the scene with Sean William Scott, animal tranquilisers and a dart gun remains a favourite.

CRAIG MATHIESON