Comedy is the hardest genre to crack; get a drama wrong and the audience will shrug or simply turn off, but fail to make the audience laugh and you’re likely to be lynched. That, coupled with the scant opportunities that exist outside of subscription TV for content that doesn’t instantly shriek of commercial appeal, makes it doubly commendable for the ABC to partner with Screen Australia and hand five emerging comedy teams a chance to have a crack at the genre by producing full-fledged pilot episodes.

One of the teams will proceed to make a full series for the ABC. Will it be Veronica Milsom and Steen Raskopoulos (pictured), the actors/creators of absurdist mockumentary The Record, in which two couples pursue ridiculous world records; one hopes to become the world’s largest biological family (69 kids and counting, well, kind of), the other hopes to train the world’s fastest homing pigeon? Or Fancy Boy, a free-form mash-up of five linked sketches? In Aunty Donna, three borderline comedians find their created world crashing up on their real-world lives in unexpected ways, while in Bedhead, the best-friends-sleep-together scenario is given an R-rated workout. Wham Bam Thank You Ma’Am is a ‘‘twisted’’ sketch comedy about dating rituals from a female perspective. The end result of this initiative is, not surprisingly, mixed, though one thing they do share in common is a bold approach. The timid and easily offended would do well to look away.

Neighbours, Eleven, 6.25pm

Erinsborough is the counter-universe to Fresh Blood. The storytelling is as straightforward as possible and character nuances are drawn with the lightest of touches. Tonight, it’s all about Imogen taking sides in the  feud between Terese (Rebekah Elmaloglou) and Lauren (Kate Kendall).

Escape to the Country, 7Two, 8.30pm

This is the TV equivalent of muzak; comforting, inoffensive, bland and forgettable. One-part real-estate porn, one-part guessing-game, it sees presenter Alistair Appleton showing London artist Carol and her wise bestie Jan a handful of desirable properties in East Sussex before settling on a favourite. Apart from a detour to Charleston House, the summer retreat of Vanessa Bell and the Bloomsbury Group, it’s all rather bland.

Paul Kalina

PAY TV

House of DVF, E!, 8.30pm

The DVF stands for Diane von Furstenberg, the woman whose 1974 reinvention of the wrap dress was such a seismic moment in fashion history that New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art keeps no fewer than three of her dresses in its collection. The elegance of those designs, however, isn’t entirely reflected in this dreary reality show, in which 10 young fashionistas compete for the chance to become her ‘‘brand ambassador’’. But von Furstenberg says she’s doing it out of a desire to mentor young women, which is nice, I guess. Tonight’s auditions turn up some seriously clueless applicants – one of whom thinks it’s appropriate to show off pics of her husband at a job interview - as well as some with impressive credentials and big personalities.

Brad Newsome

MOVIES

Enemy (2013), Thriller Movies (pay TV), 6.55pm 

In 2013 the French-Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve (Incendies) released two features. Prisoners, a scarifying thriller headlined by Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal, was the commercial success that generated attention, but the little-seen Enemy was the remarkable B-side. Where the former was dynamic in its drive for resolution, the latter was murkily still and fearful of answers. Inhabiting an atonal, washed-out Toronto, complete with hints of David Cronenberg’s psychological dread, Enemy begins with Adam Bell (Gyllenhaal), an unfulfilled history professor who unwittingly sights his double in a tiny movie role, and obsessively tracks down the actor, Anthony Claire (also Gyllenhaal). The two are doppelgangers, right down to scarring, but like magnets they repel each other, only for Anthony’s pregnant wife, Helen (Sarah Gadon) to start an intertwining. Villeneuve tells the story with a minimum of dialogue, instead relying on a calmly menacing camera and flashes of elliptical editing that comes to suggest the film’s theme, whether you see it as the divisive guilt of infidelity – Anthony pursues Adam’s girlfriend, Mary (Melanie Laurent) – or lack of individuality in modern society. “Every dictatorship has one obsession,” Adam tells his students, and Enemy makes the statement personal until the sudden beguiling conclusion.

Heart and Souls (1993), Eleven, 9.30pm

If the concept of Robert Downey jnr as one of the world’s most prominent movie stars, thanks to the superiority complex and blithe demeanour of the Marvel double act Tony Stark and Iron Man, still appears outlandish, look back at the actor’s many films from his first flush of youth (i.e. before the hard drugs and incarceration) and try to determine where his gifts belonged. Hearts and Souls was a supernatural romantic-comedy, directed by Ron Underwood (City Slickers), where Downey jnr played Thomas Reilly, a San Francisco businessman who was born just as four strangers – played by Charles Grodin, Alfre Woodard, Kyra Sedgwick and Tom Sizemore – died in a bus accident in 1959. Their spirits are still attached to him, and once they reveal themselves Thomas must resolve their problems so they can pass on to the next plane. Fresh from Chaplin, Downey physically channels his supporting cast in scenes of possession, or comically spasms in an attempt at exorcism. But he can’t do a great deal with the steady seepage of sentiment through the story, and his inescapable and corrosive intelligence hangs over the performance, as if Downey is also a spirit watching himself at work, skilfully going through the motions.

Craig Mathieson