Book Club Summer Special, ABC, 9.30pm 

I could watch comedian Kitty Flanagan reading recipes. The woman is a cracker. In this special summer-reading edition of the Book Club, she joins author Graeme Simsion, regulars Jason Steger and Marieke Hardy and host Jennifer Byrne to assess a batch of books nominated by viewers as fail-safe beach reads. There's spirited discussion of contributions from Agatha Christie, Gerald Durrell, Donna Tartt and Stieg Larsson. And, at the end, there's a winner that is likely to provoke debate after the credits roll.

Years of Living Dangerously, SBS One, 9.30pm 

This Emmy Award-winning six-part series about climate change and environmental degradation uses the star power of high-profile reporters to get its message across. In this second episode, Harrison Ford continues his alarming survey of the deforestation of Indonesia. It builds to the actor angrily confronting a politely smiling but evasive forestry minister and the then-president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Meanwhile, actor and former California "governator" Arnold Schwarzenegger joins an elite fire-fighting squad as it is called to battle a blaze threatening a Montana town. Schwarzenegger, who is one of the series' producers, notes that fire seasons in the US are now longer and the fires are bigger. The episode then moves on to explain a related threat to forests in the form of the bark beetle, which is flourishing in the changed climatic conditions. This handsomely produced series loudly rings alarm bells.

Nurse Jackie, Eleven, 10.40pm

In an era notable for its abundance of compelling female TV protagonists, Jackie Peyton remains a standout. Played with a mix of ferocity and fragility by the estimable Edie Falco, Jackie is a messy bundle of qualities and flaws. The drug-addicted  emergency department nurse is a capable professional, compassionate colleague, struggling single mother, and volatile lover. Falco plays every angle with skill and she's ably supported by the fine team at All Saints. "Sidecars and Spermicide", the 10th episode of the sixth season, finds Jackie conniving to conceal a relapse, meeting her also-struggling sponsor and confronting her elder daughter.

Debi Enker

PAY TV

I Escaped Jaws, Discovery, 8.30pm

Discovery's annual Shark Week used to be a joy. Now it's essentially an insult – to the viewer, and to the scientists who study sharks and try to educate the public about them. There are still fine documentaries to be found, but they're overshadowed by cynical hoax documentaries designed to trick people into believing in the existence of giant sharks that are long since extinct or that never existed in the first place. Discovery is now so accomplished at blending fact with fiction that it's difficult for the non-expert viewer to work out what's real. As a result, the whole thing stinks like a week-old whale carcass.

I Escaped Jaws, in which survivors of shark attacks tell their stories, is one of the most factual programs in this year's Shark Week. Not coincidentally, it's also one of the most compelling. There are several Australians among the survivors, including abalone diver Greg Pickering from Abalone Wars. The sight of him showing off the tooth that doctors pulled from his eye after he was attacked by a great white last year is memorable, to say the least.

Brad Newsome

MOVIES

Murderball (2005), Masterpiece Movies (pay TV), 5.10pm

"We had been calling it murderball," notes Mark Zupan, an American who plays wheelchair rugby at an elite level, "but you can't market murderball to corporate sponsors." Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro's documentary did not make the sport commercially palatable, but it did make clear the obsessive effort it draws. The players are quadriplegic to varying degree – it depends how high up the neck their break was – but the last thing they want is sympathy. They pride themselves on their game's toughness and the movie shows that the individual's drive to compete cannot be extinguished. Documenting the year between the 2003 World Championships and the 2004 Athens Paralympics, Murderball has no shortage of fascinating characters. As well as the tattooed, abrasive Zupan, there is former American star Joe Soares, who moved to Canada after he was dropped by selectors and became their coach. He is virtually hysterical when his newteam faces off against his former one.

The Last Castle (2000), Action Movies (pay TV), 8.30pm

Before his revelatory turn in last year's All is Lost, Robert Redford had been the most watchful of Hollywood stars, even as he turned his maturity into a version of an old-fashioned romantic lead. When directing himself Redford would strategically light his shots to avoid acknowledging the perils of ageing, and his latter films positioned him as the wise old hand, matched to a young star, but it never felt right given his insularity. In Rod Lurie's The Last Castle, he is the decorated US army officer who can't quietly serve his term in a military prison. Faced by James Gandolfini's brutal warden, Redford's Eugene Irwin turns the dispossessed inmates back into soldiers, creating an army to occupy the prison to prove that the commandant is unfit to command the facility. There is a good supporting turn from a young Mark Ruffalo as the jail's cynical resident grifter who comes through in the end.

Craig Mathieson