What Larry, Aaron, Declan, Kate, Stephen and Heather did next

TV REVIEW:ANYONE WHO saw Departure Day, RTÉ's poignant and timely documentary last January, which featured people as they prepared to emigrate, will have wondered what happened to them. Not the single lads such as Larry and Aaron, both heading for Australia, because the stakes somehow don't seem so high for them, and you knew they'd eventually land on their feet and have a good time doing it. But I did wonder what became of Declan Murphy in Australia and Stephen Martin in Toronto, and we found out in this week's excellent follow-up programme Arrivals(RTÉ1, Monday).

Both uprooted their young families because of hard economic times and saw emigration as the only option.

Murphy had tried to make a go of his family’s clothes shop in Limerick. It failed, leaving him with a pile of debts that he’s slowly paying off as the family gets established in Sydney, where he works in an upmarket department store. “We’d hate the suppliers thinking we just walked out,” said his wife, Kate. They may be on the other side of the world, but their debts have followed them. He commutes 65km to work so that they can live in the small town his Australian-born wife grew up in. It didn’t look easy, but they’re settling and can’t see themselves coming back.

In Toronto, Stephen Martin and Heather Leahy and their two small children are slowly getting established. “That’s two generations leaving,” said Heather’s mum, tears pouring down her face as she said goodbye at the airport. Stephen, a carpenter, went out a month before his family and got a job he loves within days of arrival. He works long hours, but “we’re able to save for the first time”. She’s a stay-at-home mother, isolated and lonely in a country where she knows nobody; no amount of Skyping can fix that.

The well-made, multilocation documentary looked glossy and glamorous, with its sweeping city views and aerial shots, but it didn’t varnish the truth.Many of the emigrants are working in jobs below their qualifications: the programme visited building sites filled with Irish workers, mostly skilled craftsmen working as labourers – shades of 1950s Britain. A documentary about the same emigrants in five years’ time would be fascinating.

COMEDY CENTRALis one of those high-numbered cable stations I rarely stray into because so many unfunny repeats are on an endless loop (how many Two and a Half Men and Everybody Loves Raymondepisodes are there?), so Threesome (Monday), which ended this week, was an unlikely – and mostly funny, if entirely filthy – find. It was the first comedy commissioned for the UK branch of the cable network, and it had a high Irish involvement. It was directed by Ian Fitzgibbon (who has comedy form with Paths to Freedomand A Film with Me in It) and starred Pauline McLynn, TV's most famous tea-making housekeeper, and Amy Huberman, all wide-eyed, gorgeous and hilarious.

The sit in this com is that on the eve of one of their 30th birthdays, three inseparable flatmates, Alice (Huberman), her boyfriend, Mitch (Stephen Wight), and their gay best friend, Richie (Emun Elliott), go on one of their regular drug-fuelled benders that ends back at the flat in a threesome. Yes, drugs. A threesome. Our Amy. This is not a comedy for someone who thought they'd tune in to see that nice Brian O'Driscoll's lovely wife on the telly.

Alice becomes pregnant. Some confusion later, it turns out that the gay guy is the dad, and the trio, who make convincing friends and flatmates, decide they'll bring the baby up together. Inevitably, this week's final episode ended with the birth – rarely hilarious, although writer Tom MacRae managed to squeeze a lot more laughs out of the business than usual, starting with Alice going straight to hospital from a fancy-dress party dressed as an orange spacehopper. Threesomewasn't laugh-out-loud, IT Crowdfunny, but it had many moments none the less. "The universe wants us to have this baby or else the universe would have sent us a sign," coos a nervous Alice to the prospective dads. Enter her mother (McLynn) in a Grim Reaper costume. An old-fashioned gag in a modern grown-up comedy: that's the way it was all through the series, and it worked.

THREESOME WILLprobably turn up on a terrestrial station at some point, but if you can't wait for the second series of the brilliant Danish crime drama The Killingto transfer over, it's worth trying to get in front of BBC 4 on a Saturday night. The first series was such a megahit that expectations are high for this second one. It opened with a double episode and the gruesome murder of a lawyer. Dour, complicated detective Sarah Lund (Sofie Gråbøl) is called in to investigate. A new government minister gets involved, and it's quickly clear that this series is going to be quite different from the first. It's more political, less concerned with emotions and family matters (which takes some getting used to, as the personal backstories made the first series so compelling).

As before, Copenhagen is dark and rainy, underpinning the sense of gloom and foreboding. The most obvious difference – and only fans of the first series can truly understand how different this is – is that Lund is not wearing her Faroe Islands snowflake-patterned sweater. She wore it for the entire first series, and it became a cult item. For series two she’s started off in a red hand-knitted sweater, scratchy-looking and unattractive, but it’s not the same.

ON TUESDAY BBC4showed Deadline: The New York Times, a superb up-close-and-personal documentary about the day-to-day workings of that newspaper. It's a film best appreciated by people who work in the media, but, for those who don't, it gave an insight into how competitive media organisations are and how structured and hierarchical journalism is. There is no such thing as a solo run in professional news organisations: several people, including very senior people, are always involved in even the smallest, seemingly most insignificant story – worth noting in the week that the Prime Time Investigatesdefamation story blew up and the inquiry into what happened began.

It's worth remembering, too, just how good Prime Time Investigates has been and the thorough and valuable investigative work its team had done – the programmes on Leas Cross, sex trafficking and the care of Alzheimer's patients spring to mind – but there were many others, all building foundations of deep trust between the programme maker and the viewer. Up to this, you might sometimes quibble with the style of filming but not the content, and you'd be satisfied that your hard-earned licence fee was being well spent. Not any more. It's a big loss on so many levels.

Get stuck into . . .

Small World(RTÉ1, Friday) Presenter Kat Deveraux (pictured) travels to Brazil to meet the community who returned there from Gort.