Five shows to watch this weekend
Emily in Paris returns for a gloriously dimwitted fourth season, serving up all the intellectual nourishment of a pain au chocolat. Plus, a hyper-local police show set in Blacktown.
Emily in Paris
Season 4
Netflix
Watching Emily in Paris is as good for your brain as subsisting on a diet of pain au chocolat is for your body. That is to say, it’s very bad, but it’s the best time you could possibly have. This much-ridiculed Netflix hit, now in its fourth season, comes from the mind of Darren Star — the man responsible for some of the most compulsively Watchable television of the past 30 years: Beverly Hills, 90210, Melrose Place, Sex and the City, and Younger, to name a few shows. If we’re being generous, Emily in Paris (pronounced Emilee in Paree) is most spiritually akin to Sex and the City. Except every single character is a total dunce and none of the actors is particularly good at acting. Lily Collins (daughter of Phil) plays Emily, a millennial junior digital marketing employee who has been transferred from Chicago to a Paris advertising agency that caters to luxury brands to “bring an American point of view.” She can’t speak a lick of French, her Parisian colleagues hate her and she seems to botch everything she touches. Yet she never seems to get fired — it’s the perfect antithesis to the nerve-jangling workplace drama Industry. Brilliant and stupid. Oui oui!
Critical Incident
Stan
Stan’s newest original drama, Critical Incident, was inspired by creator Sarah Bassiouni’s former career as a lawyer working on police misconduct matters in western Sydney’s juvenile justice system. This hyper-local cop drama is set in Blacktown, where the relationship between law enforcement and the over-policed local community is, to say the least, testy. The action kicks off in the aftermath of a teenage house party that is shut down by the police. It’s worth mentioning that, as far as Australian party scenes go — often overcooked and indebted to Americanisms — this one is excellently done: a cramped McMansion illuminated by a weak, spinning disco light that looks as if it were ordered off Temu; Hooligan Hefs blasting from tinny speakers; a confrontation in the kitchen after someone nicks another’s beers. These are parties we know, and you get the sense that the creators truly understand the kids they’re writing about. Unfortunately, the realism ends there. The series is plagued with moments of gobsmacking implausibility (like a drug deal executed in broad daylight at a crowded sports field). It’s such a shame that this show isn’t better than it is — the ingredients are there: a mesmerising cast of newcomers (Zoe Boe’s presence fills the screen), lovingly executed production and a compelling concept. But it never settles on what kind of show it’s trying to be. There are so many half-baked, well-intentioned ideas and jarring stylistic choices crammed into these six episodes that it ultimately falls to bits.
Slip
Binge
Here’s a fresh, breezy comedy that, forgive me, slipped under the radar. Zoe Lister-Jones (whom you may recognise as Fawn in New Girl) created and stars in this seven-episode dramedy that explores long-term relationship malaise through, well, parallel universe hopping. Mae (Lister-Jones) is in a slump. By most standards, her life is enviable: she’s a successful art curator, lives in an elegant, well-lit Brooklyn apartment, surrounds herself with brilliant, stimulating friends (Tymika Tafari’s bawdy bestie Gina is a scene-stealer) and is in a loving, 13-year relationship with her college sweetheart, Elijah (Whitmer Thomas). Yet she’s gripped by a nebulous melancholy that colours every aspect of her seemingly perfect, upwardly mobile existence — oh, the terrors of domestic comfort! One night, feeling particularly troubled, she sleeps with a handsome musician stranger and, on climax, wakes up in a parallel universe in which he is her husband.
Bad Monkey
Apple TV+
If the bitter let-down of True Detective’s second season left you feeling scorched, you’d be entirely justified in approaching another detective show starring Vince Vaughn with caution. Bad Monkey, a new series on Apple TV+, couldn’t be more different — trading in gloomy noir for a romp through the sweltering insanity of the Florida Keys. You may recall The Florida Man Birthday Challenge, an internet phenomenon that encouraged people to Google their birth date and “Florida Man” to see what wacky headline was published on their birthday (“Florida man smothers nephew’s meatball sandwich with eyedrop solution because he ‘hated him’ that day”, “Florida man accused of whacking Walgreens manager in face with Bible on Easter Sunday”). Well, the crimes in this series are very much that. Created by Ted Lasso and Scrubs hit-maker Bill Lawrence, the series stars Vaughn as Andrew Yancy, a motormouthed detective booted from the Miami Police Department after launching his lover’s husband — and his golf cart — straight into a marina. Now demoted to health inspector, Yancy is desperate to return to his post. His luck may turn: when tourists fish up a severed human arm, Yancy sees it as his ill-advised chance to get his badge back sooner. This isn’t great television but the cast oozes charisma, the locations are lush and there are enough passable gags to keep you mildly entertained. Will you make it through all 10 episodes? Prognosis: negative.
Everything’s Gonna Be Okay
ABC iview
Those who loved Please Like Me will need little convincing on Everything’s Gonna Be Okay, comedian Josh Thomas’s overlooked sitcom about a young man who unexpectedly relocates from Australia to Los Angeles to become the guardian of his two teenage sisters, one of whom is autistic, after his semi-estranged father dies of cancer. This is a very funny little family comedy whose inherent sweetness never slips into saccharine. Thomas is irresistible but he’s matched beat for beat by his two young co-stars, Kayla Cromer — the first autistic actor to play an autistic main character on a TV show — and Maeve Press.