This new show from Game of Thrones’ writers is Netflix’s best since Beef

3 Body Problem ★★★★
Netflix

Don’t be deceived by the interplanetary intrigue: humanity’s worth, and what we deserve for our collective failings, are at the heart of this deftly capable science-fiction puzzle-box.

A big-ticket production that may well be Netflix’s best scripted original series since Beef, 3 Body Problem hits the (not so) sweet spot between wonder and horror. “In nature, nothing exists alone,” one character ominously warns, and it’s the same with this series, which is a masterclass in adaptation that underpins its vast canvas with intimate dynamics.

Jess Hong and John Bradley in Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, a science-fiction puzzle-box.

Chinese author Liu Cixin’s award-winning science-fiction trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past, is not sympathetic source material. Favouring concepts over characters, and the concepts grow ever wilder, the story alternates between a present-day international crisis, where leading scientists are inexplicably taking their own lives, and flashbacks to the life of Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng), a young physicist exiled during China’s violent Cultural Revolution in the 1960s after student activists turn on her academic parents.

Something is going on, and the show’s creators, Game of Thrones architects David Benioff and D.B. Weiss along with The Terror’s Alexander Woo, relentlessly unfold it.

Moving the book’s present-day plot from China to Britain, the fulcrum is a group of five friends and former Oxford science stars whose mentor, Ye Wenjie’s daughter Vera, has just taken her life. Soon Auggie Salazar (Eiza Gonzalez) is experiencing menacing visions, while Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) and Jack Rooney (John Bradley) are playing an illicit virtual reality game set amidst an arcane civilisation.

Eiza González in 3 Body Problem: experiences menacing visions.Credit: Netflix

The eight episodes are rife with theoretical invention; blackboards and whiteboards are deployed in different eras. But 3 Body Problem also has a knack for personalising the perplexing. The lead British investigator, Da Shi (Benedict Wong) has a dry, pithy tone, while his boss, Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham), sends a jolt of cynical energy through his every interaction. The Irish spy is drily hilarious, but his blunt attitude is also transformative: unbelievable problems will require unbelievable responses.

The story makes humanity’s self-obsession a flaw that has left us both unprepared and unwilling to deal with extraterrestrial rivals, and increasingly each other. The narrative craft is impressive: until the final episodes you hear more than you see, so that suggestion hooks you in. Ideas that are relevant now, such as faith allowing for extremism, get reframed by the plot. And humanity’s response is never without risk. “The last time we gave the best physicists in the world insane resource,” we’re reminded, “they gave us Hiroshima.”

Road House ★★½
Amazon Prime

Released in 1989, the original Road House is a simple film. Patrick Swayze plays a handsome bouncer savant who won’t back down when bad guys try to take over a Missouri bar. This remake, with a ripped Jake Gyllenhaal hired to clean up a Florida road house, has more complex, and contradictory, goals. The film wants us feel how violence has damaged Gyllenhaal’s character, haunted former UFC contender, Elwood Dalton, but it also can’t wait until he goes full warrior.

Jake Gyllenhaal in the remake of the classic ’80s film Road House.Credit: Laura Radford

The movie is best when it has a sardonic restraint. “You’re not like a piano player, are you?” Dalton asks a goon whose fingers he breaks, and for the first half it works as a pungent character study, complete with Broad City’s Arturo Castro as a comic relief biker and Daniela Melchior as a busy ER doctor and love interest. Gyllenhaal’s ability to deeply inhabit fractured psyches shines through.

Director Doug Liman has previously used violence to upend his movies, whether it’s the marital sparring of Mr & Mrs Smith or the alien carnage in Edge of Tomorrow. But here, despite a bruising handheld shooting style, the fight scenes escalate into the conventional. Former real-life UFC champion Conor McGregor plays Knox, a berserker set up as Dalton’s boss level. It’s a preening, chaotic part, but the Irishman’s stunt casting is one-note. Not enough of Road House’s punches connect.

Kristen Wiig stars in Palm Royale,Credit: Apple TV+

Palm Royale
Apple TV+
There’s a great deal going on in this period comedy, which opens with a pastel-powered blast of oddball humour and social snobbery as an interloper to wealthy 1969 Palm Beach society, Maxine Simmons (Kristen Wiig), tries to gain access to the strip’s titular country club. Created by Abe Sylvia (The Eyes of Tammy Faye), there’s sketch farce, delusional pathology, and revisionist history at work, with Wiig playing Maxine with a mannered optimism. I’m watching to see if it ties together, and for a stacked supporting cast that includes Laura Dern, Alison Janney, and the legendary Carol Burnett.

Girls5eva: Busy Philipps as Summer, Renée Elise Goldsberry as Wickie, Sara Bareilles as Dawn, Paula Pell as Gloria.Credit: Stan

Girls5eva (season 3)
Netflix
All praise to Netflix for picking up one of the best comedies of the last five years and producing a third season. A pop-music satire, Millennial ambition comedy, and most of all a perceptive retort to a society that devalues women once they reach their 40s, Meredith Scardino’s series about a one-hit wonder girl group from the late 1990s reforming against the odds is a delight. The rapid-fire gags, not to mention the sublime songs from the Girls5eva catalogue, never obscure the genuine emotional investment the leads invest in their character’s narratives.

From the ’90s animated series, the acerbic high-school student Daria is now available for streaming.

Daria
Paramount+
MTV ceased to be a viable source of programming years ago, essentially repeating the comedy clip show Ridiculousness at an unforgiveable level, but one of its best and certainly most influential series is available in full to stream. Debuting in 1997 as a Beavis and Butt-Head spin-off and running for five seasons, Daria was an adult animated comedy about acerbic high-school student Daria Morgendorffer (Tracy Grandstaff), whose adolescent disdain allowed for classroom satire and wider social criticism. Committed to commentary and occasionally flirting with commitment, Daria plays like a precursor to today’s female auteur comedies.

Joel McHale (second from left) with the Animal Control team.Credit: Fox

Animal Control (season 2)
Binge
Joel McHale will never get to star in a sitcom as exceptional as Community ever again, but could we at least get some good gags for his latest venture? A workplace comedy about a group of animal control officers in Seattle, Animal Control is now in its second season and still making do with chippy workplace banter. In a way, it’s authentic, after all, no one’s day on the job comes with one perfect punchline after another, but also dispiriting, especially with the cast around McHale being up for more.

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