Five shows to watch this week
Cate Blanchett is a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Alfonso Cuaron’s mysterious Disclaimer, plus a series about the romance that inspired Leonard Cohen’s greatest love songs.
Disclaimer
Apple TV+ from Friday October 11
Here is a series that follows in the great tradition of Notes on a Scandal and Tar, which is to say, it stars Cate Blanchett as a woman whose gorgeous life is on the verge of imploding because a terrible secret from her past is to be revealed. Disclaimer, Apple TV+’s new outing from Oscar-winning director Alfonso Cuaron (Y tu mama tambien, Roma, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) has been billed as a “seven-part event’’. This is fitting, because at no point does the show — based on Renee Knight’s bestseller and which premiered at the Venice Film Festival — feel like television. Rather, it’s a sleek, cinematic exercise in narrative subversion. While it is undoubtedly one of this year’s most audacious television experiments, it may not be as divisive as some have predicted; the show thrives on withholding, and with its weekly episode drops, many viewers may give up before seeing it through to the end. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t any good — it’s cold, beautiful and mysterious. In brief: Blanchett plays Catherine Ravenscroft, an acclaimed, detached documentarian whose life is up-ended when she discovers she is the main character of a mysterious, self-published and entirely scandalous novel. Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen, Lesley Manville, HoYeon Jung (of Squid Game), and Australia’s Kodi Smit-McPhee also star.
Killer Cakes
Prime Video, from Tuesday October 8
If you found Disclaimer maddeningly cerebral and crave something dumb and fun to wash it down with, take a bite out of Killer Cakes. The premise is basically: what if the production company behind Paranormal Activity (Blumhouse Pictures) made a version of The Great British Bake Off? This two-part baking competition, hosted by Matthew Lillard — whose own resume in fright includes Scream and Five Nights at Freddy’s — pairs ambitious bakers with a taste for the macabre and a team of Hollywood special effects artists to conjure cakes that would make even the most iron-stomached diners recoil. Think maggots, bile, blood, and guts. Bon appetit!
Nobody Wants This
Netflix
Nobody Wants This will humble anyone who has ever looked down smugly on Marvel fanatics who foam at the bit over fan-servicing crossover films like Deadpool & Wolverine. In this clever new Netflix rom-com, we get a different kind of crossover: two titans of early 2000s teen drama: Adam Brody, best known as the angsty emo dream Seth Cohen in The OC, and Kristen Bell, star of the punchy high school noir Veronica Mars. It’s pandering, it’s irresistible — and it’s bad news for Andrew Scott, whose tenure as our go-to religious crush (the hot priest from Fleabag) is officially over. Enter the achingly charismatic Noah Roklov (Brody), who is newly single and on his way to becoming a head rabbi when he meets the agnostic sex podcaster Joanne (Bell) at a party and the pair immediately hit it off. Their chemistry is electric, though it’s a nightmare scenario for their respective circles. This is a winning rom-com, with witty dialogue and crackling chemistry between Brody and Bell. Justine Lupe, who played the ditsy Willa in Succession, is in top form as Joanne’s cold fish sister and podcast co-host, Morgan.
Will & Harper
Netflix
This documentary is less a documentary and more a breezy road film, propelled by the irresistible camaraderie of two funny people at the wheel. It tells the story of the friendship between Will Ferrell and Harper Steele, a bond forged in the comedy trenches of Saturday Night Live. Steele was once known as Andrew — an “Iowa born-and-raised, 501-wearing, shitty-beer drinking, hitchhiking kind of guy” — until she came out as a transgender woman in 2022, at the age of 61. She revealed her transition in an email to her closest confidants, one of whom was Ferrell, her longtime friend. They first met in the 1990s, when working on SNL. Upon learning of Steele’s transition, Ferrell proposed a road trip through America’s Red States, as a way to understand this new chapter in Steele’s life. Their journey is punctuated by frank, tender conversations on everything from gender dysphoria and top and bottom surgery to the quiet fears — such as stopping for gas in a small town — and the newly discovered joys Steele experiences as a trans woman.
So Long, Marianne
Premieres Monday October 14
on SBS On Demand
Here is a television series about the romance that inspired some of the greatest love songs: So Long Marianne; Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye; and Bird on the Wire. This marvellous, languid eight-parter transports us to the small Grecian island of Hydra in the 1960s. Canadian songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen — who had not yet made it — has just moved to join its flourishing artistic community. There, he meets and falls intensely, albeit briefly, in love with Norwegian Marianne Ihlen, whose beauty and spirit would inspire some of his greatest works. Alex Wolff (Hereditary, Oppenheimer) plays Cohen. He does a wonderful job and never overplays it. The startlingly lovely Thea Sofie Loch Næss plays his muse. Noah Taylor and Anna Torv play the writer couple George Johnston and Charmian Clift — often dubbed “the Ted and Sylvia of Australia’’. Any ardent Cohen fan will already know these stories intimately, but it is still thrilling to see them brought to life on the screen.