Before Maestro there was Mozart in the Jungle

Conductors are getting their Hollywood close-up. In this series, Gael Garcia Bernal portrays an irresistibly zany character, loosely based on the Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel.

Gael Garcia Bernal in a scene from the TV series Mozart in the Jungle. Supplied by Stan.

Carol & the End of the World

Netflix

Do you go through life with the nagging feeling that having fun comes naturally to everybody except you? If so, you should take comfort in this wonderfully strange Netflix animated miniseries. This show is set in the early 2000s in an unnamed American city on the brink of the apocalypse. In seven months, a rogue planet will smash into Earth, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it — except spend what limited time they have living as intensely as possible. While everyone is busying themselves with spiritual enlightenment in Tibet and mass orgies in abandoned office depot stores, Carol Kohl — a shy, 42-year-old woman — is channel surfing on the couch, not quite sure of what to do with herself. When she attempts to dip her toe in the end-of-the-world revelry, it doesn’t fit right — she’s more suited to attending to her laundry than rubbing shoulders at a rave. She finds her groove when she stumbles upon an accounting office, which is inexplicably still running despite money and jobs being superfluous in the end times. There’s a lovely Bojack Horseman-ish ennui to this.

The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning

SBS on Demand from January 1

If you inhaled Tidying up With Marie Kondo, you won’t have to strain too hard to enjoy this. Except instead of having to face that horrifically garish sweater you bought in a Black Friday-induced bout of mania, this asks that you confront your own mortality. This reality TV series, produced and narrated by Amy Poehler, is based on Margareta Magnusson’s best-selling book of the same name. It is, essentially, a guide to sorting through and disposing of your possessions before you die, so that your loved ones are spared from sifting through your junk, and only left with the things you want them to remember you by — an essential practice for anybody who spends a lot of time ruminating on potential future embarrassments. This is a funny, absorbing show that feels a lot like the Netflix reboot of Queer Eye, but instead of a gorgeously enthusiastic gaggle of gays, the three hosts are vaguely frightening Swedes.

Fat Friends

Britbox

When you think of an “early 2000s British comedy about diet culture,” warmth and empathy aren’t two traits that come to mind. Instead, there are intrusive thoughts of Steve Miller cruelly bleating, “Watch out, massive fatties, the lard police are in town!” on the 2010 docuseries Fat Families. All this is to say that Fat Friends, which aired between 2000 and 2005, will take you by surprise. It was written by Kay Mellor, who passed away last year, and was behind some of British television’s smartest, best-written shows, such as the lotto dramedy The Syndicate and the female-led crime show Band of Gold. The show centres on friends from Leeds, all part of the same slimming group, with each episode zeroing in on the lives of various members. The cast is marvellous, particularly Alison Steadman, who plays Betty, a weight-obsessed owner of a chippy. Actors Ruth Jones and James Corden — both relatively unknown at the time — met on set and went on to write the sitcom Gavin & Stacey.

Rectify

Stan

So often, TV feels like it’s doing too much. Gratification comes too early, and windy plot lines and sharp twists are unceremoniously lumped on you, making it impossible to both keep up with and care about what’s going on. You’re left feeling like a disgruntled toddler, with parents desperately waving toys in your direction in the hopes of subduing a brewing tantrum. Rectify is a balm for that kind of television. This miraculous drama, which aired for four seasons from 2013 to 2016, eschews instant thrills in favour of a character-driven narrative that’s in no great rush to get anywhere. It tells the story of Daniel Holden (Aden Young), who, in his late teens, was convicted of the rape and murder of his 16-year-old girlfriend, Hanna — in a murky incident involving psychedelics. He served 19 years on death row, most of them in solitary confinement. When we meet him, he is being released on a technicality. Things aren’t all hunky-dory; the DNA evidence cleared him of the rape, but not the murder — and the folks in his small Georgia town aren’t convinced of his innocence, and, because Daniel has little faith in his memory, neither does he.

Mozart in the Jungle

Amazon Prime

Between Tar, The Conductor, Maestro, and Maestra — conductors in Hollywood are having a moment. But before those films came the giddy, preposterously titled dramedy Mozart in the Jungle. This series — co-created by Roman Coppola, Alex Timbers and Jason Schwartzman — is loosely based on the Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel. It follows the irresistibly zany conductor Rodrigo De Souza (Gael Garcia Bernal), who is brought in to shake up the New York Symphony. He has the kind of druggie, devilish, sex appeal you’d associate with the mythologised rulers of CBGBs, not the rigid world of classical music. It’s beautifully shot, free wheeling fun.