Five things to watch this weekend
The third season of Netflix’s daft and delicious Regency-era bodice-ripper, Bridgerton, is here.
Bridgerton
Netflix
Stop trying to resist getting sucked into the Shonda Rhimes universe. Bridgerton, back for a third season, is one of the star producer’s finest, daftest pleasures. For those in need of a primer: the series, based on the extraordinarily popular romance novels by Julia Quinn, follows a fictional family navigating the social mores of Regency high society. This edition — to be released in two parts, with the first four episodes out now and the final four arriving in June — revolves around a new “social season.” It’s catnip for those who just want to watch a bunch of good-looking actors flounce about in hooped frocks and frills. At the start of the new season, we find that wallflower Penelope Featherington (a knock-out performance from Nicola Coughlan) can no longer bear living under the thumb of her trill mother. She must find a husband, but it’s her third year on the marriage market — and she’s in dire need of a crash course in all things seduction.
Queer as Folk
Stan
Is there a television actor who has been in as many seminal shows as Aiden Gillen? Between The Wire, Love/Hate, Game of Thrones, and Peaky Blinders, one thinks not. Here he is as a bright young thing in Russell T. Davies’ groundbreaking Queer as Folk — a joyous, bums-out bacchanalia set in Manchester’s vibrant, hedonistic gay scene. Gillen plays Stuart Alan Jones, a louche advertising executive lothario who has “copped off” with every Tom, Dick, and Harry on Canal Street. The series revolves around him, his best friend Vince (Craig Kelly), who has kept a candle burning for him since they were teenagers and is down on his luck with casual hook-ups, and the 15-year-old Nathan Maloney (Charlie Hunnam), new to the gay scene but brimming with self-confidence and sexual frustration. It is astounding how edgy this series, which first aired in 1999, feels today. Queer as Folk is so much more than its shock value. Once you make it past the gobsmackingly raunchy first episode, you’re met with a show that, at its core, is an unbearably touching drama about friendship and chosen family, with dialogue that is next to none and the finest selection of knitted vests to ever have graced the screen.
Such Brave Girls
Stan
At the BAFTA awards this week this show took home the trophy for Best Comedy, and for good reason. Written by and starring Kat Sadler, it is a comedy so tar-black that you will feel terrible about laughing. It tells the story of a dysfunctional family: mum Deb (Louise Brearley), not so much desperate for love as she is for stability, trying to make it work with a recently widowed loser who takes “iPad time” in the middle of a date; Sadler’s Josie, who is constantly on the verge of a full-blown psychiatric episode and struggling with her queerness, while her mother insists it’s just a phase; and her younger, self-obsessed sister Billie, who is almost always in green face paint thanks to her job as a children’s entertainment witch at the UK equivalent of Lollipops Playland, and who is utterly boy-crazy. This is a bawdy, disgusting comedy about mental health, which rings painfully true for young people who treat mental illness like it’s all a bit of a laugh because acknowledging it
as life-ruining would be far too painful.
Dreaming Whilst Black
SBS on Demand
Here’s another one that was up for Best Comedy at the BAFTAs. The web series turned proper television show is about an aspiring filmmaker named Kwabena (co-creator Adjani Salmon), who works a humdrum day job at a recruitment firm but dreams of directing a film about his grandparents, who were part of the Windrush generation. The problem is that it’s nearly impossible to secure funding. Salmon sketched out the scenes from real stories told by other Black colleagues, resulting in a sharp satire about racist microaggressions in the entertainment industry and everyday life, as well as an anarchic workplace cringe comedy. In a memorable scene early in the first episode, Kwabena is asked by a white colleague what film he should watch on a first date with a Black woman. The colleague then proceeds to suggest titles like The Color Purple, Precious, and 12 Years a Slave – all of which, as Kwabena points out, feature the rape of Black women – before another white colleague chimes in with his “feel-good” suggestion: the controversial 2018 Oscar-winner Green Book. It’s the kind of show that will have you muttering “oh God, no” under your breath in embarrassment.
Scavengers Reign
Binge
Word on the street is that Netflix has swooped in to save this astonishing animated series from dying a premature death. Scavengers Reign, an HBO Max animated series, premiered late last year to little fanfare. It was never going to be a hit; it’s a deeply weird, oddly paced, far-out bit of psychedelia that demands and rewards the kind of attention we don’t have in surplus these days. Without getting too far into the weeds, it’s about a group of survivors who are stranded on an unfriendly alien planet. Fans of animation – particularly the freaky, imaginative monsters that populate the Studio Ghibli universe, and the menacing illustration style of Moebius – will find something here for them.