Television: Another year, another pageant in a Kerry car park

You take extra-long summer holidays, a TV-free three weeks, and you think that surely The Rose of Tralee International Festival 2015 (RTÉ One, Monday and Tuesday) will have come and gone, with all its eccentricities and genre-defying hours of viewing, and you won't have to see a toe-curling minute of it. But, no, on Monday there on stage, in front of the Garda band, is Dáithí Ó Sé, a pink tutu over his tuxedo, talking to a Newbridge-bejewelled rose in an evening dress.

There’s a world of weirdness in that one sentence – and it describes only a five-minute slice of the nearly six-hour, two-night show. And that you so easily slip into calling a woman a “rose” – forgetting her name because the contestants and the dresses look pretty much the same each year – shows how quickly you can sink into watching the Rose of Tralee in a sort of a slack-jawed stupor, smiling at the overexcited mammies and proud daddies in the audience, their eyes opening wider only when some rose delivers a self-penned poem. My favourite is the rose whose lengthy ode to her mother includes the line “You named her Gráinne, and she loved her bainne.” Sure where would you get it? Nowhere else is where.

Ó Sé owns it, although I can’t imagine who could possibly take over from him. Last year’s winner is credited with changing the contest’s image – because she’s, gasp, a nondrinker. (Oh, okay, she’s also gay.) But that idea’s entirely fanciful. At its beating heart this is still beauty pageant meets village feis in a big tent in a Kerry car park.

If anyone has changed it, it’s Ó Sé. He’s more confident now, dialling down the culchie shtick he layed on thick in his first dome outing, in 2010. Now he’s more like an old-school Saturday-night variety-show presenter, because he’s up for anything, whether it’s getting a Pilates lesson on stage – “work your core, Dáithí” – or presenting a mammy with a birthday cake.

Aside from the “Do ye have a boyfriend? Six years? He’d want to get a move on so” line of questioning that for decades has been in the competition’s core script, consider all the other antics that now go on and ask yourself, would Gay Byrne have done that?

It takes the TV scriptwriting and storytelling genius of David Simon – creator of The Wire – to take the subject of local politics in a small New York state town in the late 1980s and make it relevant and contemporary. (Although Borgen, based on coalition politics in Denmark, showed that in the right hands even the most unpromising-sounding story arc can deliver.) Show Me a Hero (Sky Atlantic, Monday), his new HBO six-parter, is based on a news reporter's book about real events in Yonkers when a federal ruling called for a new desegregated building programme.

The predominantly white community baulked at the idea of black people – who mostly lived in ghettos – moving to their neighbourhoods. Tensions grew, and local politicians saw an opportunity to build power on the back of the growing community divisions while lining their own pockets.

Simon is in the familiar territory of racial tension, inequality, the powerlessness that comes with poverty, and the inability of local government to stop serving its elected members’ individual interests and instead serve the people. See, universal contemporary themes.

Those same themes appeared in Simon's more recent drama Treme, but with a wall of complex characters it was hard to find a way into that slow-moving story. Show Me a Hero is pacier and has a strong central character to follow, in Nick Wasicsko (Oscar Isaac), who in the first episode is elected mayor. A Bruce Springsteen-dominated soundtrack pumps up a 1980s American blue-collar atmosphere while Paul Haggis, the Oscar-winning director of Crash – it's HBO, so big names dominate the credits – captures a drab, washed-out town where nothing should happen but everything does.

"This is a true story" reads the white type on screen in the opening shot of The Scandalous Lady W (BBC Two, Monday), smartly reeling me in to what slowly unfolds with directorial finesse and stunning acting to be a luscious-looking drama about a little-known (by me, anyway) 18th-century scandal.

Despite the insistent soundtrack – there's only so much intrusive chamber music you need to hear in an evening's viewing – The Scandalous Lady W is probably my favourite period drama of the year so far. Move over, you dreary Bloomsbury set, in the relentlessly wordy and unfailingly tedious The Square (BBC Two), who appear to think they discovered sex, scandal and women's rights. This period drama, set centuries before, is the real deal.

The very beautiful and wealthy Seymour Fleming – even her name is sort of fabulous – marries Sir Richard Worsley, a Tory politician on the up who turns out to be not just seriously pervy but also a domineering bully. It’s at a time when in English law a man simply owns his wife. Worsley (Shaun Evans) is quick to remind his new bride (a luminous Natalie Dormer) of how seriously he takes the “obey” part of the marriage vows; he also says he is afflicted by the “horncholic”. He gets his jollies setting his wife up with his friends and watching them “rantum scantum” – there’s slang that didn’t survive the ages – through the keyhole of the bedroom door.

She falls in love with one of them, Capt George Bisset (Aneurin Barnard ) and has a daughter. Worsley sues Bisset for £20,000 – she is his property, after all – intending to bankrupt him. Seymour, by agreeing to reveal, in detail, that her husband made her sleep with 26 men, creates a riotous scandal – the courtroom scene is sensational in every way – and her husband’s suit fails.

The Scandalous Lady W hadn't looked promising. A story set in the 18th century, with aristocratic men in brocade coats and knee stockings, and women with giant backcombed hairdos, seemed too stiff and mannered to yield a sparky, enthralling yarn. But this classy drama has a terrific story to tell, and it does so vividly well.

tvreview@irishtimes.com