What to stream this week: Five shows and a stand-up special to add to your list
This week’s picks include Atlanta star Brian Tyree Henry’s return in a compelling drug drama, blind superhero Daredevil’s second chance and comedian Andrew Schulz gets personal.
Dope Thief ★★★★ (Apple TV+)
Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura in Dope Thief.
Donald Glover’s Atlanta was fuelled by audacious leaps and conceptual twists, but the show’s emotional bedrock was the performance of Brian Tyree Henry as Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles, a rapper who finds success but not satisfaction. Henry’s ability to plumb soulful depths was illuminating, and that same quality finds equal purpose in this gritty crime thriller. As Raymond Driscoll, a stick-up artist in over his head, Henry has a magnetic drive. It’s a masterful performance, frayed and fearful, like Raymond’s psyche.
Raymond and his best friend, Manny Carvalho (Wagner Moura), put on DEA windbreakers and fake badges to rob minor Philadelphia drug dealers. “We take our cut from the chaos,” Raymond explains, and their bravado gives them a superiority complex until a new associate leads them to a rural Pennsylvanian property, where the heist goes very wrong. The pair escape with cash and narcotics, but it’s the property of a powerful organisation. Raymond and Manny are being hunted within hours.
Ving Rhames in Dope Thief.
Dope Thief is an adaptation of Dennis Tafoya’s 2009 book of the same name, created by novelist turned screenwriter Peter Craig (a co-writer on The Town and Top Gun: Maverick). It has pithy dialogue and a grim momentum, with strains of The French Connection and No Country for Old Men. Raymond and Manny are not ready for what they have to do – they make procedural errors and lack the callousness of their foes. As a mournful parallel story involving real DEA agents shows, the duo is essentially considered bait for bigger fish.
From the first episode, directed by Ridley Scott, crime is a fact of life when you’re part of an underclass. Raymond and Manny met in juvenile detention and, having got clean, their stick-ups are calculated to keep them afloat financially. The post-industrial landscape they move through is functioning but barely held together. The risks they’ve taken make sense, but Manny can’t handle the scrutiny once they leave their lane. This is not a story about master criminals making decisive moves.
Raymond is defined by the life he didn’t have. Aside from Manny, the one person he’s trying to keep safe is Theresa (Kate Mulgrew), the de facto stepmother who raised him after his dad, Bart (Ving Rhames), went to jail. The visits between father and son are combative but telling. Bart calls Raymond a “stray dog”, and Henry makes that a reality on the screen. Raymond ventures forward where he shouldn’t because he doesn’t want his past to catch up to him. The bittersweet and buckshot have rarely made better sense together.
Daredevil: Born Again ★★★½ (Disney+)
Charlie Cox is suited up as Daredevil/Matt Murdock in Daredevil: Born Again.
It’s a low bar, but Marvel has produced its sharpest superhero series in years by going back to the future. There were three seasons of the original Daredevil – blind Hell’s Kitchen lawyer Matt Murdock by day, masked vigilante by night – between 2015 and 2018: bare-knuckle action sequences, believable stakes, and a gnarled sense of humour and responsibility. That’s all still there in this reboot, complete with Vincent D’Onofrio returning as Daredevil’s nemesis, hulking crime lord Wilson Fisk.
After a brutal whirlwind of an opening, the show sets up Murdock and Fisk as men who don’t want to be defined by their past. The former is reluctant to don his suit, the latter has renounced crime to run as a populist New York mayoral candidate. Their mutual attraction and disdain is full of good superhero pulp: menace, regret, sticky psychological need. It helps that lead directors, independent filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, supply vivid illumination.
Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page and Charlie Cox as Daredevil/Matt Murdock.
Not everything works, including a self-contained episode halfway through the season, but creator Dario Scardapane gets Murdock’s need for self-flagellation and the franchise’s ability to have sensation heaped on, whether it’s a serial-killer plot or pungent sightings of another 2010s Marvel TV character, Jon Bernthal’s Punisher. Fans of the original Daredevil should be satisfied, but newcomers shouldn’t have a problem getting up to speed. Self-destruction is easy to comprehend.
Andrew Schulz: LIFE ★★★ (Netflix)
Andrew Schulz performing his stand-up special at the Beacon Theatre in New York.
Stand-up comic Andrew Schulz made his name throwing out jibes in every direction while making it feel like his digs were inclusive, but his new special is a left turn for the New York comedian. The hour-long set focuses on the efforts by Schulz and his wife, Emma, to conceive a child through IVF treatment. It still gets Schulz’s treatment, including his disdain at the poor mark a doctor gave to his sperm, but there’s a degree of introspection and even vulnerability new to him. Could he have extended that to others previously?
Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue ★★½ (Stan)
Eric McCormack (middle) leads the cast of thriller Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue.
The always versatile Eric McCormack (Will & Grace) does his best in the lead role, but this Agatha Christie-in-the-jungle murder mystery does not make the strongest of starts. Framed by the title’s set-up, which obscures any relevant identities, the story follows the survivors of a small passenger plane crash, whose quest for survival in the wilds becomes much more difficult after one of them starts offing the others one by one. Creator Anthony Horowitz (Foyle’s War) tries for uneasy suspense, but in a time when the murder-mystery is having a welcome renaissance, this show feels boilerplate.
Scamanda ★★★ (Disney+)
Fraudster Amanda Riley’s story is told in the documentary Scamanda.
Adapted from the popular podcast of the same name, this four-part docuseries is a crisp, chronological recap of the outrageous – and long successful – grift of Californian wife and mother Amanda Riley, whose extensive blogging about her struggle with fake cancer diagnoses led to supporters being defrauded and eventually US government charges. There’s not a great deal of insight or artfulness to the production, which comes from America’s ABC News, but the story has that familiar shock value of hypocrisy and car-crash fascination. You will want to stick around for the comeuppance.
The Hardacres ★★½ (BritBox)
The rags-to-riches drama The Hardacres.
Not to be a downer, but some felt this 1890s rags-to-riches drama had Aidan Turner-era Poldark vibes, but I must report that this tale of a working-class Yorkshire clan who unexpectedly go from misfortune to fortune is a cosier, accommodating vehicle. Sharing a production house with the All Creatures Great and Small reboot is a broad indication of tone, as Mary and Sam Hardacre (Claire Cooper and Liam McMahon), along with their children and her mother, undergo a Downton Abbey-sized culture shock. It’s not challenging, but some may find it satisfying.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.