What’s on TV this week: Our Planet, Veep, Barry, Sabrina and more
When Netflix tries something new, it goes all out. The streaming service has invested major cash in a series it hopes you will love.
While the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, is trying to buy your votes with an election budget at 7.30 tomorrow night, know that you have an alternative.
Who needs to suffer through listening to droning Australian pollies when you could be wetting yourself laughing at dangerously inept American ones? Don’t worry, these are fictional politicians, so it doesn’t come with the baggage and depression of any real-life elected clowns.
Veep returns for its final, delicious season this week at the exact time as the Budget and, even better, it’s now part of a 90-minute power block with Bill Hader’s Barry and the What We Do in the Shadows TV remake.
One word: Yes.
So, go ahead, skip the Budget — you can read all about it (here!) anyway and, believe me, the government will be spinning all of its announcements non-stop for the next six weeks anyway.
OUR PLANET
(Netflix — Friday, April 5 from 6pm AEDT)
Our Planet is Netflix’s ambitious, multimillion-dollar gamble into nature programming — and it’s poached David Attenborough for the ride.
The eight-part series is four years in the making, filmed across 50 countries with over 600 crew members. From the remote Arctic wilderness to African savannas, Our Planet will be an expansive experience for nature lovers who will be treated to penguins, baby gorillas, leopards, whales and 2.34 billion leaves.
Produced by the same team behind Planet Earth and Blue Planet, Attenborough will voice the English language version of the series while the likes of Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek has been recruited to narrate the Spanish and Latin American versions.
With nature programming easy to translate for a global audience, as well as an enormous appetite for them, Netflix is hoping it’ll be money well spent.
VEEP S7
(Fox Showcase on Foxtel and Foxtel Now – Tuesday, April 2 at 7.30pm)
Selina Meyer is desperate to be president again — because, you know, she did such a great job the first time. When confronted with why she wants to be president, her churlish response, not one she would share publicly, is she’s entitled to it, it’s her turn, goddammit.
Veep has been nominated by Washington insiders as the political TV show that most resembles real life in the capital, which is a terrifying indictment of the ruling class — and not at all surprising that a “claim” to power would a primary motivation.
Anyway, as much as you could consider Veep as a scarily relevant to our political era, what it’s really here for is to make you laugh, and laugh, and laugh, and laugh.
There is no shortage of clutching your sides and struggling to stay vertical. The jokes are venomous, the put-downs even more so and it’s the very last hurrah before the unlikeable but oddly relatable Selina and her gang bow out at the end of this season.
Simply the best.
BARRY S2
(Fox Showcase on Foxtel and Foxtel Now – Tuesday, April 2 at 8pm)
The first came and went with little notice in Australia and it’s a shame because Barry is very, very excellent.
The Bill Hader co-created TV show about a remorseful assassin turned wannabe actor is just as dark as it is funny. Despite his desire to make up for everything he’s done, Barry spent most of the previous season always making the wrong choice when presented with a moral quandary.
Those choices are going to catch up with him this season.
Hader and Henry Winkler both picked up Emmys last year and their dynamic as Barry and Gene, his acting teaching, is very watchable. A likeable supporting cast includes Anthony Carrigan as a sweet and optimistic Chechen mobster and Stephen Root as Barry’s handler.
Barry has humour and pathos and it balances them expertly.
WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS
(Fox Showcase on Foxtel and Foxtel Now – Tuesday, April 2 at 8.30pm)
On Staten Island, a group of centuries-old vampires have to deal with eternal life as well as the small quibbles of sharehouse living. The melodrama of vampire stories is offset by the mundane and everyday burden of living forever and still needing to buy glitter from the supermarket for your undead hootenanny.
What We Do in the Shadows could have gone very wrong — you just never know with American TV remakes of overseas titles. And the 2014 New Zealand movie the show is based on is so beloved by audiences, it was a dicey proposition.
But, with the original crew of Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi involved behind the camera if not in front, the remake has the same kind of low-key, oddball energy. Phew.
RELATED: Full review for What We Do in the Shadows
CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA PART 2
(Netflix – Friday, April 5 from 6pm AEDT)
The battle for Sabrina’s soul in the coming apocalypse is on.
Now that the precocious teen witch has signed her name in the book of the beast, can she resist the temptations of his power or will she stay true to herself? That’s the main theme — that and rising up against the patriarchy — of the second part of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which returns with nine new episodes this week.
The gothic and slightly camp series is a far cry from the kitschy and family friendly 90s teen series, and it’ll venture into new territory that may be “controversial” to older, less progressive viewers, but will seem so natural to young audiences.
THE TICK S2
(Amazon Prime Video – Friday, April 5)
The Tick is a superhero series that takes itself much, much less seriously than its TV and movie counterparts – how can it not when the hero is a tall guy dressed up as giant blue insect whose sense of humour is very literal.
The Tick is an easy and pleasant little show, great for a diversion.
In season two, Arthur and Tick may have saved their city from The Terror but doesn’t mean it’s free from new threats. Now they have to convince the government agency in charge of managing superheroes (gotta love those bureaucrats) that they should be appointed guardians. But they have competition.
YOU CAN’T ASK THAT S4
(ABC and iview – Wednesday, April 3 at 9pm)
There are certain questions you would never ask someone for fear of offending or upsetting them. But You Can’t Ask That will. Not in a defiant, arsehole way, but in way that could help us understand people’s experiences and destigmatise them, even if the answers are confronting.
Returning this week for a fourth season, the series will probe marginalised or misunderstood Australians with questions deemed too “uncomfortable” in polite company.
This week, the episode features with those who have been through domestic and family violence, while future chapters in this series will ask questions of African-Australians, intersex people, ex-pollies, disaster survivors, carnies and alcoholics.
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