Murder and bullying are the tasty items on the Prime TV menu in July, with bullying pushing its way in first to begin the month on a cheery note.
New Zealand series Bullies, paid for by New Zealand on Air, is a three-episode series looking at an issue that is apparently something of an epidemic.
The country, the show points out, has one of the highest recorded rates of bullying in the world - though probably not in Dunedin, where we are generally very well brought up and well behaved.
Nevertheless, the show explains that one in five Kiwis say they have been victims of bullying, leading to harassment claims, litigation and lost productivity costing the country hundreds of millions of dollars.
How has this come about?
The first episode of Bullies looks at the practice in the workplace.
That includes at an aged care facility, a dairy farm, and a case in which a science educator took his life in 2013 after allegedly being put under extreme pressure at his job at the Waikato Museum.
The show uses the expertise of behavioural coach Dr Paul Wood, Culturesafe NZ director Allan Halse, and workplace investigator Mary Irwin.
It asks what behaviour can be called bullying, whether it can be stopped, and whether bullying is more destructive now than it has been in the past.
Bullies starts on Prime on Tuesday, July 7, at 8.30pm, and is something you should probably watch.
Murder, meanwhile, is the subject of Weekend Murders: Endeavour.
Endeavour is a prequel to the long-running and very good Inspector Morse, and is also set primarily in Oxford. Shaun Evans plays the young Endeavour Morse, who is beginning his career as a Detective Constable with the Oxford City Police CID in the mid-1960s.
But the young Morse is in quite a state as series two begins.
Series one ended with the keen young detective being shot while trying to apprehend a murderer.
At the same time, he was forced to come to terms with the death of his cold and unfeeling father (possibly a bully).
Series two finds him just a shadow of his former self, after a time on light duties.
Told by the (I think) daughter of his senior officer he has lost weight, and asked what he has been eating, Morse relies: ''Mockery and humiliation, mostly.''
But events will surely draw out the best in our young detective.
There are plenty of clues about as ominous classical music draws viewers in - something to do with 1066, perhaps, or D-Day; and who is the man in the fashionable brown suede shoes?
Weekend Murders: Endeavour begins on Sunday, July 12.
• Charles Loughrey
