3 Body Problem: a mad spectacle that lacks feeling
Whether you’re looking for a sci-fi spectacle or Cillian Murphy in his most romantic role yet, your long weekend watching is sorted.
3 Body Problem
Netflix
Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have done the unthinkable and, alongside True Blood’s Alexander Woo, pulled off a ripping version of Remembrance of Earth’s Past, Liu Cixin’s “unadaptable” hard sci-fi trilogy. This is a daring, free-form ride through time and space that is far too sprawling to condense into a measly blurb. There’s byzantine theory on astrophysics and virtuality that will scramble your brain; elite scientists inexplicably dying by suicide; and an impending alien invasion. It’s a lot. The throughline that keeps this beast chugging along is the decades-spanning story of the scientist Ye Wenjie (Rosalind Chao). The show takes us from her youth during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, where she witnessed her father brutally beaten to death by the Red Guard, to the present, where she works as an exiled researcher on a remote military program. What 3 Body Problem – it takes its name from Newton’s law of motion – lacks in human feeling, it makes up for in spectacle.
The Way We Live Now
Britbox
How do you get Anthony Trollope’s 1875 doorstop of a novel off the page and turn it into a succinct, complete, and beguiling four-part television series? You get Andrew Davies, who wrote the screenplay for BBC’s Pride and Prejudice, and director David Yates — best known for the last four Harry Potter films — on the case. This succulent drama centres on the fraudulent financier Augustus Melmotte (Suchet), who arrives in England with a mysterious past and rumours swirling about his shady swindles. That Melmotte is of dubious provenance doesn’t matter because at this time, the fortunes of the landed gentry were in crisis, and he has enough money to buy his way into aristocratic favour. This has everything you want in a period drama: a foppish Matthew Macfadyen behaving like a petulant cad; Suchet doing far too much with his eyebrows as a panto villain; and a young and luminescent Cillian Murphy in what may be his most romantic role to date.
Population: 11
Stan
Stan’s new comedy series, inspired by the case of missing man Paddy Moriarty – which The Australian covered in its podcast series Lost in Larrimah, and which was later the subject of the Netflix documentary Last Stop Larrimah – is exhaustingly unfunny. Ben Feldman stars as Andy, a meek American banker who travels to the outback town of Bidgeegud in search of his father. It’s the kind of rinky-dink town where the one pub doubles as a church, and the zoo’s lone animal is a pet crocodile called Jeff. This is a town full of “characters” such as the Chinese-fusion pie shop owner Audrey (Emily Taheny), who sells “camel-toe pies”; and Andy’s own father, who hosts Outback UFO tours which has brochures claiming “guaranteed sightings”. Watching this, you can imagine how the pitch went down: “It’s The Tourist meets Welcome to Woop Woop”, but it lacks the propulsive plot of the former and the glorious weirdness of the latter.
The Dry
SBS on Demand
If you braved Population: 11 and found yourself in need of a palate cleanser, consider Nancy Harris’s exquisitely tart comedy The Dry, which is back for a second season. This series, dubbed “The Irish Fleabag” when it premiered last year, follows Shiv (Roisin Gallagher), a wannabe artist who escaped Dublin to chase a bohemian life and success in London. She didn’t make any great art, but she did fall into alcoholism. When we meet her, she’s six months sober and at an event – a wake for her granny at her madhouse family home – that could make even the most resolute teetotaler lurch for the bottle. From the moment she steps in the door, dysfunction reigns – clearly, these are people who do not know how to treat somebody in recovery. “Are you sure you’re an alcoholic?” one attendee asks. “She was always such fun,” gossips another. It’s the kind of unbearably tense single-location smackdown that recalls Emma Seligman’s great 2020 comedy Shiva Baby, and it works brilliantly. All the characters here seem like the worst people in the world, but because they’re so beautifully fleshed out you can’t help but barrack for them. There’s Shiv’s highly strung, ultra-competitive sister Caroline (Siobhán Cullen), who seethes with resentment; and her younger, party boy brother Ant (Adam John Richardson). Her parents, whose marriage is on the rocks – dad Tom (the amazing Ciarán Hinds) is knocking off his acupuncturist — are well-meaning but utterly useless. It’s less “funny ha ha”, and more, well, deliciously miserable.