Five things to watch this weekend
For those left looking for a cop drama to tide you over after Blue Lights, you can’t do much better than The Responder.
The Responder
Season 1; Season 2 premieres on SBS, May 30
SBS on Demand
For those left looking for a cop drama to tide you over after Blue Lights, you can’t do much better than The Responder, series two of which premieres next week. On paper, this sounds like the kind of copper show you’ve seen a thousand times over: a tormented officer wrestles his demons while trying to do good in an underfunded force in a crumbling Northern English city. But the show’s writer, Tony Schumacher — a former police officer and taxi driver — writes about the human side of things with such precision and heart that it feels quite unlike anything you’ve seen before. Martin Freeman plays Chris Carson, a pill-popping urgent response officer on the beat in Liverpool. Chris is on the edge of a nervous breakdown — his mum is dying, his family life is in shambles, and he’s in therapy attempting to deal with his residual childhood trauma. It’s remarkable to see Freeman, who we’re so used to seeing play gentle types, in a tough and volatile role. The meat and potatoes thriller plotline revolves around the hunt for a young drug addict named Casey, who has stolen the coke stash from the local drug dealer (Ian Hart in a laughable wig) and is now being hunted down. It’s typically riveting, but it pales in comparison to the offbeat side quests the bobby has to deal with on the job — such as two mentally ill neighbours violently arguing over dog mess.
Vernon Subutex
SBS on Demand
If you haven’t yet had the pleasure of devouring Virginie Despentes’ Vernon Subutex book trilogy, on which this superb French-language series is based, that is your first port of call. This adaptation tells the story of Vernon (Romain Duris), the former owner of the tastemaking record store Revolver, which was all the rage in the ‘90s but has fallen victim to the streaming era. He has a punk, eternally young spirit that is at odds with surviving in gentrified Paris. When we meet him, long-unemployed and approaching his fifties, he is being evicted from his charmingly grimy apartment for owing 16 months rent. To give you a sense of his personality: when the bailiff rocks up to chuck him out, he doesn’t bother to turn off the porn he has been absent-mindedly consuming and attempts a bribe – a few more days to gather his belongings in return for a test pressing of the first Thugs album. This is a great rock’n’roll couch-surfing adventure filled with irresistibly sleazy characters. There are shades here of Nick Hornby (music obsession) and Michel Houellebecq (the demoralisation of modern French life), with a smashing post-punk soundtrack to boot.
Portlandia
ABC iView
The influential feminist punk band Sleater-Kinney touring Australia this month was a great reminder of this gem of a comedy that guitarist Carrie Brownstein wrote with the comedian Fred Armisen. It is, as the name suggests, about the city Portlandia, “Where young people go to retire.” It’s the kind of slacker city where there is no incentive to do much of anything at all, and that makes for a refreshingly laid-back sketch-comedy in which the artsy left poke fun at themselves and their terminal laziness. While some of the references in the show (pictured below) feel a tad dated and the quality drops off a bit in the final seasons, there is still plenty of fun to be had. This is a show for the music nerds with cameos that rival The Simpsons — The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, Misfits’ Glenn Danzig, Jack White, and Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder to name a few. Plus, there’s the always-welcome presence of Kyle MacLachlan as the city’s easygoing, push-bike-riding mayor.
Hoop Dreams
Stan
It’s been 30 years since Hoop Dreams first premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and it remains the greatest, most incredibly moving sports documentary ever made. What was supposed to have only been a ½-hour documentary transformed into a far-reaching, 2½-hour odyssey tracking five years with Wiliam Gates and Arthur Agee, two African-American eighth-grade basketball players who are recruited from inner-city Chicago to a predominantly white suburban high school, with the hopes of being tapped to play in the NBA. Infuriating and inspiring.
Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal
Netflix
Watching a documentary as devastatingly beautiful as Hoop Dreams and then pivoting to this bog-standard Netflix slop was whiplash-inducing. But if you’re after something dishy that you can half-watch while getting through chores, this is the ticket. It is about the Ashley Madison scandal that rocked North America. For those in need of a refresher, Ashley Madison was, and still is, a dating site for married people who want to have discreet affairs (its motto: “Life is short. Have an affair”). In 2015, a mysterious hacking group called The Impact Team threatened to leak details of the site’s 30 million users. And then they did. The names, login details, email addresses, payment details, and encrypted passwords for thousands of users were leaked, with devastating consequences — marriages were ruined, families wrecked, and, in extreme cases, people took their own lives. The concept of Ashley Madison feels quite antiquated in the era of dating apps like Feeld, where polyamory and nonmonogamy are au fait; watching this, one can’t help but think that’s for the better. Look out for Graeme Blundell’s review in coming weeks.