Helen Trinca TV reviews: your essential viewing guide

In need of some binge-able television hits to get your through the last of the days of the holiday season? Well, look no further.

Laure Calamy and Nicolas Maury in Call My Agent!

Call My Agent, Netflix

Like The Bureau, this show is so good that by the end of a few seasons of each, you emerge convinced that, yes, you can indeed speak French like a native. Call My Agent is so binge worthy that you really need a summer or (perish the thought) another lockdown to do it justice. It began in 2015 under the title Dix pour cent (Ten Percent) and some of us are hanging out for the fifth season due to drop this year. It has a clever conceit at its heart – the talent agents at the core of the show are confronted each episode with the (fictitious) problems of a real-life actor. At first one is not sure who these persons are – so many French actors are largely unknown to us – but once you get the drift, it’s simply delicious seeing everyone more or less send up everyone and everything in sight. There is, of course, an English-language version shot in 2021 and released on Amazon Prime (but who wants to miss a chance to hear those French accents). The original stars the wonderful Camille Cottin who has since carved out a great global film career. Cottin is just one of a smart ensemble but as the seasons pass her performance as the attractive and somewhat promiscuous gay woman steals the show with her looks and her acting.

The Americans, Binge

Quality is quality and if a series has it, it will last forever. That’s the case with The Americans, the extraordinary show that launched in 2013, ended five years and six seasons later and remains compulsive viewing on Binge. For many of us, it’s up there with The Wire, Ozark, Better Call Saul, and The West Wing for sheer staying power, writing, acting and production values. The Americans – the story of a couple of Russian agents who during the Cold War set up home and false identities in suburban Washington – is a series, like those mentioned above that can be watched over and over. It helps that principal actors Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, whose onscreen chemistry led them to a real-life marriage, are subtle and sexy. The stories are complex and beautifully grounded in period espionage. Some will find the killings for the sake of the ideology of the Soviet Union just a little too much. But this is top range and shows not a scintilla of its age.

Yellowstone, Stan

Talking about ideology, this Kevin Costner-led look at the ranch culture of Montana has been pulled into the culture wars around land, race and good old American gun culture, but it’s so much more than that. Yellowstone is a confronting series, now into its fifth season (which I have not yet got to) but immersion in the first four seasons offered a surprising tour of some of the complicated threads that comprise American identity. Costner is superb – he’s older and to my mind much better than in any of his movies – and particularly in the first couple of seasons, creates an archetypal character who somehow embraces and breaks all the stereotypes. The show goes to issues of land ownership, cultural clashes and the assault of capitalism and modernity on heritage that are rarely addressed in mainstream entertainment. Here’s a show that arguably became far too violent in season four yet shocks you into rethinking attitudes to identity and country.

The Australian Wars, SBS On Demand

Connection to land is the thread that runs through the even more shocking deaths recorded in Rachel Perkins’ three-part documentary on Australia’s own clashes over country. Shocking, because this is real history, not the fiction of Yellowstone. I had little interest initially in this series: did I really want to watch three hours recording the nation’s shameful past? How much more was there to know about that period? But The Australian Wars, like Noel Pearson’s ABC Boyer Lectures on Radio National in 2022, is outstanding, the kind of show that changes attitudes and detonates the half-truths that have dominated white society’s view of the wars that began after the arrival of the British in 1788. Perkins herself leads us across her land and our land country, and across the decades of silence and stereotypes, talking to white and black historians, and anthropologists and archaeologists as she documents the casualties on both sides that we have often preferred to ignore. In the year when we will be asked to put our attitudes on the line and vote on an Indigenous Voice to parliament, The Australian Wars really should be on your list – whichever side you might decide to come down on.

Friends from College, Netflix

Before we start on this one, a warning. This is a great concept and a good show, yet only two seasons were made before it was cancelled in February 2019. So if you are addicted to character development and want to know what happens to the characters in your favourite shows, don’t start on this one. You will be disappointed, as there is no closure, with producers clearly leaving the door open for the third season that never came. Still, I loved it, even if it uses a timeworn concept – the group of friends tackling life as adults (this time they are fortysomethings) linked by those few years of youthful relationships. It could have been an excuse for some giant cliches or at least a rerun of The Big Chill, but it’s more ambitious, tackling infidelity and love and the whole damn thing with surprising honesty. The only problem is that if you identify with the players and their lives, you will find there is unfinished business here. And if you get to the end, you will wonder why exactly the network decided not to extend a show that just might have ended up a classic like that other one about adult Friends.