Five TV shows to watch this weekend
Australian newcomer Hoa Xuande goes tit-for-tat with Robert Downey Jr. in Oldboy director Park Chan-Wook’s stylish new series The Sympathizer.
The Sympathizer
Binge
South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-Wook, known for his sexy, violent films like Oldboy, The Handmaiden and the Nicole Kidman-starring Stoker, directs this seven-part miniseries based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. The Australian actor Hoa Xuande plays the Captain, a North Vietnamese mole who has planted himself in the intelligence office of the American-backed South Vietnamese military leader known as the General (Toan Le). When Saigon falls, he is instructed to follow the General and his family to Los Angeles. There’s also Robert Downey Jr playing four roles — a C.I.A. agent, a conservative congressman, a professor and a filmmaker. He is essentially playing exaggerated versions of himself under different mountains of Latex, but it’s a lot of fun. Park’s filmmaking style is an assault on the senses — all crazed camera work and breakneck editing. It doesn’t always work, but it is always interesting.
Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Children’s TV
Binge
At the start of the millennium, no production company dominated children’s imaginations quite like Nickelodeon. Disney had its share of wholesome hits but it was Nickelodeon, with its gross-out sensibility, that had us kids out in the backyard, brewing an ungodly concoction of cornstarch and green food colouring to make “slime” to hurl at one another. This depressing four-part investigative docuseries aims to blow the lid off Nickelodeon and reveal a toxic workplace where, in the 1990s and early 2000s, misogyny and racism were the norm, and child stars were subjected to sexual and psychological abuse. Central to the series is Dan Schneider, the untouchable “golden boy” producer behind hit teen sitcoms such as Drake & Josh, Zoey 101, Victorious and iCarly, who abruptly departed in 2018, only for allegations of sexual misconduct and gender discrimination to follow. Because Quiet on Set was released in Australia weeks after it first aired in the US, the press has juiced everything possible out of its big bombshell, and its impact feels somewhat muted. The rest of the overlong series relies too heavily on tears and trauma to mask what it lacks in precision and depth. This terrible story is worth paying mind to; it’s been told better by iCarly star Jennette McCurdy in her memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died.
Girls5eva
Stan, Netflix
No one wants to heap praise on a multibillion-dollar streaming monolith, but sometimes we must eat crow and thank Netflix for swooping in and saving Girls5eva from premature cancellation. This uplifting sitcom, produced by Tina Fey (there are shades of 30 Rock here) and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt writer Meredith Scardino, is a treasure. It follows four 40-something women who set out to reform their 1990s girl group and give fame one last crack. Some backstory: the group, Girls5eva, had one hit (Famous 5eva) three decades ago but dropped off the face of the earth after their follow-up single — Quit Flying Planes at My Heart, released on September 10, 2011 — tanked. In the years since, one of the girls has died (Ashley, in an infinity pool incident), and the remaining four members have grown apart, settling into their wildly different lives. It’s a silly, savvy and sneakily touching comedy about second chances, where the jokes come in at a mile a minute.
Conan O’Brien Must Go
Binge
Speaking of good old-fashioned jokes … Conan O’Brien is having a renaissance. It’s not like he dropped off, per se, but we Zoomers were too young to witness him at the peak of his Late Night show powers. That all changed last week, thanks to his demented, viral appearance on the YouTube show Hot Ones, a brilliant interview series where guests are asked questions while they eat increasingly spicy wings. O’Brien was a man unhinged; he mainlined lethal hot sauce directly from the bottle until his eyes were glowing red and he was frothing milk from the mouth, all the while pocketing half-eaten chicken wings.
It was comedy gold, and the best possible PR for his new travel series, a four-parter that takes the comedian on all kinds of adventures through Norway, Argentina, Thailand and Ireland. O’Brien thrives in this format because he is always the butt of his own jokes.
Mayflies
SBS on Demand
This is an intelligent, heartbreaking and astonishingly well-made adaptation of Andrew O’Hagan’s book about a terminally ill man, Tully (Tony Curran), who asks his childhood best friend Jimmy (Martin Compston from Line of Duty) to help him
end his life on his own terms in a euthanasia clinic without the knowledge of his
wife. Tully is proud, with a mordant sense of humour. He refuses to spend the waning months of his life being robbed of his dignity in a hospital, saying, ‘Don’t let me die like a prick.’ It is devastating, and you will watch the two one-hour episodes with a tightness in your throat, but it’s not without moments of levity. The flashback scenes, set in 1986, where the lads go to Manchester for a music festival and freak out over spotting their rock star heroes (the Smiths’ Johnny Marr), are life-affirming stuff.
