I missed out on grunge’s guitar-spat sludge of teennui; a religious upbringing will do that to you. But having been accompanied to Last Days by a +1 who defers heart-in-hand to the gospel of Kobain, I imagine that might have been for the best. Because sorry to break it to ya kids, but no juiced-up it-was-Courtney-in-the-greenhouse-with-the-shotgun redeyeing here.

Junk-time runs on a needle-to-know basis (ever wondered why the fuckers can’t keep their dates straight?); Friend says when you’re not high you’re horny, and when you’re not horny everything’s expendable. But nine years later and Boyle’s grit-licked misshapes are right where we left ‘em, clouded in heroin smoke, sadhappy Brit-pop on loop.

Bertolucci doesn’t like to beat around the bush: In The Dreamers he gets anti-Oedipal on our ass with softcore conviction. You might ask, do we really need more horny, ageing Eurateurs flouting viagra prescriptions in the name of bird-flipping American puritanism?

MILF hunters beware: Isabelle Huppert might be the most desirable 50-year-old woman in cinema right now, but tread carefully, 'cos if her on-screen sexual history is anything to go by, then you're in for some seriously f'ed up shit. Fuck, being the operative word in Christophe Honoré's appropriately depraved take on Georges Bataille's posthumous novel Ma mère (My Mother): basically the birds and the bees, role-played for real, with not a pamphlet or euphemism in sight.

The bomb has dropped. Call it what you will, but Veronica Mars (Friday, 7.30pm, TV2) is the most subversive thing on the box at the moment – a statement anyone who saw Friday night's anvil-of-an-episode will vouch for. That includes ruling out Desperate Housewives, the so-called sophisticate of the soap-dish: really nothing more than four dolled-up MILFs on a hiding to nothing 'cos – surprise, surprise – they're trapped in the infinity of suburbia. Wisteria Lane just happens to be another Rockwell-tinted derivative of the suburban facade, something that might've been pertinent back in the fifties when pre-packaged living was all the Time-Life rage, only *yawn* nowadays, the bubble-wrap culdesac is as ubiquitous as it is problematic (don't get me started).

What is it with Six Feet Under (Thursday, 9.30pm, TV1) and dead people? Being harassed from the grave isn't unheard of in television drama, but for a show about undertakers, you almost expect it to be commonplace. The Fisher family pillar head, Nathaniel Fisher (Richard Jenkins), carked it in the pilot episode, and since then has made regular visits from the afterlife to see his wife, daughter and sons. He usually offers advice; not so Lisa (Lili Taylor), Nate's (Peter Krause) dead hippy wife who materialized in last week's season opener (the fifth and final) to lay the smackdown on Brenda (Rachel Griffiths). She was pregnant with Nate's child, only miscarried the night before their wedding. Most sane folk would have postponed, but fuck that. They tie the knot the next day as scheduled, despite placenta still running between her legs.